by Weldon, Fay
She sits up in bed. She combs her hair. She looks at her face in the mirror.
‘I am beautiful,’ she says. ‘I am talented. Y is nothing, nothing. That is the whole trouble. A man can only be happy with his inferior.’
‘What a strange thing to say,’ says Jocelyn.
‘It is perfectly true,’ says Helen. ‘That is why Philip will never be happy with you.’ Jocelyn leaves the room.
On the fifth day Helen gets out of bed and stands naked before Jocelyn. Not as the girls at school would stand naked and shivering under the showers, but like some goddess, arms up-stretched towards the heavens, as if they were her natural home.
‘Well,’ says Helen. ‘I am still alive. So, while we wait, let us live.’
Helen goes through Jocelyn’s wardrobe, without enthusiasm, and finally condescends to wear a lambswool sweater and skirt. She wears no bra, which shocks Jocelyn, who is alarmed by the sight of nipples through stretched wool, and disconcerted at the way Philip’s eyes are riveted while they eat dinner. Philip plies Helen with wine. Helen talks of painters and paintings, and scandals in the art world. Jocelyn forgets that she ought to be jealous. Already she cannot bear to think of the world without Helen.
On the sixth day Helen takes Jocelyn shopping. They go to Liberty’s, and Helen feels fabrics with her sensitive fingers, and regards clothes with an eye that seems only to be pleased by what is very expensive, and very precious. Helen adopts a haughty attitude towards material things. It is as if they have to try very hard to please her. Jocelyn, for her part, tends to feel inadequate in the face of objects, as if it was she who failed in the appreciating, not they in the pleasing.
Helen buys clothes, and a real leather trunk to put them in. She spends over seven hundred pounds. Jocelyn does not like to ask where the money comes from. But Helen, on the way home in a taxi, offers the information.
‘I came into some money,’ she says. ‘Reparation money from Germany because of my ruined life.’
‘Is your life ruined?’ asks Jocelyn.
‘Not in the way they think,’ says Helen, ‘but yes, my life is ruined.’ She seems resigned, almost cheerful.
‘Is it a lump sum?’ asks Jocelyn, awed by someone who’s life has been so disturbed that even governments take notice. ‘Not a pension or anything?’
‘A small lump sum,’ says Helen. ‘I spent most of it this morning.’
‘On clothes!’ Jocelyn is shocked.
‘If one has to be poor,’ says Helen, ‘one can at least be poor in style. One must never accept what is second best. Even in degradation, one can choose. The gutter one lies in must be the deepest, dirtiest, freest-flowing gutter of them all. If one eats weevils, let them be curly, plump and strong.’
And she promises to take Jocelyn to Harrods the following day and advise her on new fabrics and furnishings for her living-room. Helen’s presence has made Jocelyn worried lest her home might be tatty, vulgar, and tasteless.
But by the seventh day Helen has gone. Not back to the studio – though she has tried, only to be faced by Y, who has moved in and is now working there with X – but to live with Carl, a man whom Jocelyn never even knew existed. Carl is a rich man, and an art collector – a patron of X’s. His desire to be part of the creative process is so strong that it stretches to include even Helen. Nightly he makes love to her, and feels that this above all is art. Here he roots and plunges, hour after hour, conscious not so much of her, but that here X has gone before.
Helen endures, for the sake of the porcelain out of which she sips her morning coffee, and daily brushes him out of her consciousness, like crumbs from the breakfast table.
As for Jocelyn, she recognizes now that everything about her life is second-best, and has been for a long, long time.
Butch has gone to Germany to play rugger. Sylvia, six months pregnant, again – the last child was stillborn – goes to stay with Audrey-Emma and Paul in Suffolk.
The house, crumbling, unpainted, but picturesque, stands alone in a stretch of flat and boring countryside. It is a wet autumn, and to look out of the kitchen window, Sylvia thinks, is as rewarding as holding a wrung-out dishcloth before the eyes. Audrey-Emma and Paul, however, talk about the satisfactions of living next to nature; and about the rhythm of the seasons. ‘The children have a real feel for the country,’ says Paul. They are not allowed to look at television, talk to corrupting estate children, eat white sugar, read comics, or, in theory, say please or thank-you.
They are pale, pretty, withdrawn children (a boy of four and twin girls of three) with pink runny noses and bad chilblains, and clothes which seem for ever caked in mud. Audrey-Emma does not often wash clothes – let alone iron them – but Paul’s family, understandably anxious for his children’s welfare, have for years been sending monthly parcels of old clothes, and Audrey-Emma herself likes to buy at jumble sales, so, though always muddy, the clothes do change from day to day.
When Paul requests her to wipe a nose or sweep a table, or spray the cockroaches, she is too busy – either baking 100% wholewheat stone-ground compost-grown bread or reading Beatrix Potter, aloud – to oblige. She chides her husband for his bourgeois soul. As Paul’s interest in anarchy, old films, Chinese pottery, and health foods wanes, so does Audrey-Emma’s increase.
Paul is kind to Sylvia, who is gentle, female, passive and never answers back. She both lays the table for meals and clears away afterwards, which is something Audrey-Emma never does, although she must get up and down twenty times during each meal, and each time she does so she looks at Paul and sighs, either reproachfully as if to say, ‘Look how hard I have to work and it’s all your fault,’ or, on good days, virtuously, as if to say, ‘Look how sweet and domestic I am being.’
During Sylvia’s stay, deprived of this outlet for her feelings, sitting quietly at the table eating, she feels restless and discontented. She tries to persuade Sylvia to leave Butch.
‘I’m pregnant,’ says Sylvia. ‘How can I?’
‘Women can have babies by themselves,’ says Audrey-Emma. ‘Look at Scarlet, she manages all right. It was only when she was married she had such a hard time. And then again, look at me. I bring my children up single-handed, practically. Paul takes no notice of them at all. I think he is what is called a rejecting father.’
Outside, Paul labours through the mud towards the hen house, tall, pale, and bearded, with a pail of chicken-food in each hand, his three children rolling in the puddles around and behind him, so he has difficulty in walking. There seems total trust between them. Sylvia says nothing.
‘You don’t even know Butch is going to marry you,’ says Audrey-Emma. ‘This has been going on for years.’
‘It’s his divorce,’ says Sylvia. ‘Something is always going wrong. But he won’t leave me. He has to get his gear washed. All that mud every week.’
‘Don’t talk to me of mud,’ says Audrey-Emma, with bitterness. ‘I have it every day.’
‘I thought you liked living in the country,’ says Sylvia.
‘I couldn’t bear to live in a city,’ says Audrey-Emma, automatically. ‘Filthy, sooty, nasty places. Do you know that when Londoners die their lungs are black with embedded soot?’
There is no heating in the house that day. The electricity has been cut off because the bill has not been paid. But there are candles, and rush-lights and an oil stove to cook on. Audrey-Emma cooks four-course meals upon it; dishes up home-grown vegetables, omelettes made of fresh eggs, cottage cheese made from sour milk hung up to drip in stockings in rows in the kitchen; sponge pudding made with heavy brown flour and black strap molasses. A meal will take her three hours to prepare, but nothing puts her off.
‘You’ll just have to wait,’ she says. ‘We can’t let the Electricity Board get the better of us. People have lived without electricity for centuries; so can we, and what’s more we’ll live well.’
Her family sit down at midnight, exhausted and shivering. The children stay up. ‘Families must eat together,’ says Audr
ey-Emma. ‘That’s what you said, wasn’t it, Paul, when I left my horrid job in London and we came down here? People must be together, totally, within a family. Live together, work together, sleep together. Eat together, even if it is a bit late.’
Audrey-Emma likes to have the children in bed with her and Paul. If he protests, she goes and sleeps with them in their bedroom.
There are bee-hives in the garden, but the swarms succumbed to a disease of some kind last year. Paul says jokingly, ‘Emma ill-wished them.’ Sylvia finds dusty, curled-up bees in corners everywhere. ‘Now Emma has ill-wished the hens,’ he adds.
And indeed the hens, in the previous few weeks, have been hit by illness. Moulting fowls huddle in the unkempt garden. ‘Before that,’ Paul complains, ‘she ill-wished the kiln. It overheated and cracked. I’ve never been able to raise the fifty quid to mend it.’
Emma-Audrey laughs at her husband’s jokes, but breaks crockery in the kitchen after he has made them.
‘He overheated the kiln on purpose,’ she explains to Sylvia eventually. ‘I’d started to do pottery myself, and frankly I was better than him. So of course he had to go and crack the kiln.’
Meanwhile the rain pours down outside, and in through broken tiles inside; the children draw on the walls with chalks and press plasticine into their hair; Paul sits in the study writing poetry; Sylvia chops fresh vegetables on the dining-room table with a patent Victorian vegetable chopper (soon the vegetable will boil brownish pink from traces of old varnish from the table’s surface); and outside a hundred and seventy-seven hens have not even the energy to seek shelter.
Soon after Sylvia departs, the man from the Ministry of Agriculture turns up. Emma-Audrey prepares to do battle with broken bottles and an air-rifle but Paul, who seems dispirited, and lacks his old ferocity, lets him in, answers questions, and fills up forms.
Emma-Audrey is angry and bewildered.
The Ministry claims the birds have Fowl Pest. Emma-Audrey proves to her satisfaction, by consulting Victorian text-books, that they have an obscure infection which is transmitted by ailing bees, and is curable by dietary control.
The Ministry has the hens destroyed. Emma-Audrey wishes to go to law. Paul will not allow it. Emma-Audrey sulks. So does Paul.
Presently he has talks with his Bank Manager and sets up a battery unit, and produces eggs and chickens by intensive farming methods. He pours penicillin into the mash. The birds, in their tiny cages, have not room to turn around, least of all to peck their neighbours. Their chests are naked, pink and swollen where they have rubbed against the mesh.
Emma-Audrey weeps for all trapped creatures, sleeps nightly with her grubby, restless children, and starts buying her vegetables canned. She has more housekeeping money these days.
10
Sorting Out
I went to a party the other night. At midnight, the host escorted a woman guest to her home. By five in the morning he had not returned. The hostess continued with her hostessly duties, smiling politely. What else could she do? She is fifty, intelligent, and nice, but she is fifty. She has been trained to behave well, and not to shout, scream or murder, and that is the only training she has had, besides cookery and housecraft at school. Her husband is rich; if it were not for him she would not be able to give a grand party, and in any case he will be home for breakfast which she will have the privilege of laying on the table before him. So what is she complaining about? What does she expect?
The woman guest needs comforting. Can one grudge her a simple sexual drunken pleasure? Her husband has just left for Norway on business with his secretary, who has long blonde hair and what her husband describes as laughing eyes. The secretary in her turn needs comforting because her boyfriend has become engaged to a plain fat girl who cooks Apfelstrudel and piles it high with whipped cream, and who came top in housecraft at school. ‘A man needs two women,’ maintains the boyfriend who is all of twenty-two, ‘one to cook and one for bed. I love you but I shall marry her. As life goes on, sex grows less important and dinner more so.’ The secretary, indignant as who would not be, zooms off to Norway in the woman guest’s husband’s Jaguar, for a month’s straightforward affair with the boss, with a little shorthand thrown in. She prefers office work to cooking.
The hostess, fifty and at the end of the line of distress, smiles politely and offers hot soup to departing guests. Soon she will be a grandmother. That seems comforting, down among the women. One wishes marriage for one’s daughters and, for one’s descendants, better luck.
Wanda, Byzantia’s grandmother, feels first relief, and then a spasm of fright when Scarlet leaves Edwin. The period of her reprieve is over. If Scarlet has rejected wifehood, Wanda must presumably resume motherhood. Wanda knows that Scarlet has left home only because Edwin telephones her, and accuses her of a conspiracy which, he maintains, is punishable by law.
‘She is your wife,’ says Wanda, recovering her composure quickly. She does not like to show surprise. ‘She is your responsibility. Nothing to do with me any more.’
‘She is your daughter,’ he retorts. ‘And you’ve been egging her on to this. You’re a man-hater. I hold you responsible. I shall divorce her and sue you for enticement.’
Wanda shrieks with drunken laughter, her hand jovially diving for the crotch of her lorry driver, who is a young out-of-work alcoholic History graduate grateful for a temporary home and someone to buy him drinks.
‘No one who married a man like you,’ she says, with glee, ‘is any daughter of mine.’
‘I shall get Byzantia away from you,’ says Edwin. ‘You’re none of you fit to have a child in your care. You’ll be hearing from my solicitors.’ And he slams the phone down.
Presently Wanda looks out Scarlet’s old telephone book, traces some of her friends, and telephones them. But no one has seen or heard of Scarlet.
Edwin rings again. He is crying. He apologizes for being rude. He wants Scarlet and Byzantia back. He loves them. The house is silent and empty without them. If he has behaved badly he is sorry. He will go down on his knees if anyone wants him to. He pleads with Wanda to allow him to speak to Scarlet. It is a long time before she can convince him that Scarlet is not with her.
‘Then where is she? You’re her mother. Where else would she go?’
‘Perhaps she has a lover,’ suggests Wanda.
‘Who?’ he is very sharp.
‘Now how should I know? You haven’t let her speak to me lately; if I can’t give you any information you have only yourself to blame,’ says Wanda unkindly.
‘So long as it’s no one local,’ he says. And then, with real feeling, ‘Supposing she’s in some trouble? I only ever wanted to look after her and little Rosemary.’
‘Little who?’ asks Wanda.
‘I used to call her Rosemary. I never liked Byzantia as a name.’
Wanda’s heart, which had been softening towards Edwin, hardens again.
‘If I hear from her I’ll let you know,’ she says, ‘and in the meantime please stop pestering me with phone calls. You bore the piss out of me, if you want to know.’
There is a short silence. Then Edwin says, coolly, ‘I shall have to report certain things to the Education Authority, you know.’
‘Report away,’ she says, ‘report away!’ and puts the phone down.
‘Poor bloody sod,’ she says to her lorry-driver. ‘I suppose Scarlet drove him mad. He was eccentric when she married him. Now he’s fucking mad.’
But she telephones Kim, all the same, to tell him his daughter is missing and ask him what he means to do about it. Kim, as usual, is not in, so she speaks to Susan. Susan, lately, has been in the habit of visiting Wanda, although Wanda does not know why. Susan on a visit tends to just sit around, and smile in a vague and worried way. She talks very little, except about Simeon’s education – he goes to a school for young gentlemen behind Harrods and wears a curious cloth cap which rests on his infant ears and all but covers his dull eyes. Simeon is very clean and well-behaved, and Susan i
s proud of him.
Now Susan, hearing the news, begins to cry. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she says, ‘I shouldn’t have told her I was seeing you. Now she’s out and she’ll murder me.’
‘She hasn’t been in prison,’ says Wanda. ‘Merely resting. Now Byzantia’s five, life can start for her again.’
‘It’s nothing to do with the child,’ sobs Susan. ‘It was what I said to her. I should never have interfered. Now what’s going to happen?’
What happens is that the next day Scarlet turns up, her hair blonde and permed, at Wanda’s flat and asks if she can leave Byzantia with her mother for an hour or two.
‘Off whoring?’ asks Wanda. ‘Already?’
To which Scarlet retaliates by turning to the lorry-driver and saying, ‘If it’s a mother you’re after you’ve come to the wrong address.’
(‘I don’t know what happens to everyone,’ Scarlet says to Jocelyn later. ‘The older we get the more we become ourselves. We were nicer when we were younger and all little bits of other people.’)
Wanda sends the young man out to get fish and chips and enquires where Scarlet is living. Scarlet replies, haughtily enough, that she imagines that this is a matter of indifference to everyone, especially to her mother.
‘Not to your loony husband,’ says Wanda. ‘He wants you back.’
‘Which is more than you do,’ says Scarlet. ‘Don’t worry. I shan’t be a burden to you.’ And she snivels. She does not like to see her mother in the company of this young man.
‘Oh, for God’s sake grow up,’ says Wanda. ‘You’re a grown woman, not a little girl. If you don’t want to tell me where you’re living, don’t. Only don’t use me as a dumping ground for Byzantia while you go off to parties.’
‘You can’t stand it, can you,’ says Scarlet. ‘You can’t stand me having a good time. You and Edwin ought just to have got married and left me out of it.’
Byzantia stops staring at the television (a twelve-inch screen these days) and begins to grizzle. She is very tired, having spent the previous night in a strange boarding-house, the morning in a hair-dressing salon and the afternoon in a domestic agency. Wanda scoops her up in her arms. Byzantia likes her grandmother, and is instantly happy. She smiles benignly and falls asleep. She has lost her infant plumpness; she is now long-legged and wide-eyed.
