by Weldon, Fay
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she says to Helen. ‘Do you think I’m going mad? I tried all these years to be something I wasn’t; now I’m trying to be the opposite, and it’s just as upsetting.’
‘You don’t have to be anything,’ says Helen, piously, ‘except yourself.’
‘I haven’t got a self to be,’ complains Audrey. ‘I change every five minutes. It was much easier when we were all younger. Ever since I’ve had the children, I’ve been confused. I always thought I was the one who was supposed to be the child. And it was all my own doing, that’s what I can’t get over. All the same, the children were the only real thing that ever happened to me. But of course Paul won’t let me have them. It’s not that he loves them, he just wants to punish me.’
Presently, when Helen has gone, and she has forgiven the Editor, and he has been re-instated as a once-weekly visitor, she asks him if she could not have a manservant.
‘I would like to have your children,’ she says. ‘To do that I have to have space, money and time. These are the three things children need most. I can give them space and money; but time? I can’t give up my work, it wouldn’t be fair, and all the rest of my life and energy is spent in either meeting your sexual demands or cleaning this house of yours.’
‘But you live here, not me –’
‘– at your insistence. I would be just as happy living on a park bench, if not happier. However, you’ve landed me with this bourgeois monstrosity. I think the least you can do is not burden me with the task of cleaning it. I need a daily man – not a woman, they lie and steal and nag – to do it for me.’
The Editor hires a manservant-cum-chauffeur – an out-of-work actor with a beard, who flirts with Audrey, and lives with his wife and children in the basement flat.
Soon she is pregnant. She spends days in Harrods, in the baby-clothes departments. She sends the bills to the Editor’s home, where his wife comes across them.
‘You should have been more careful,’ Audrey accuses him. ‘You probably meant her to find them, in your neurotic way. You know what it means, don’t you? I can’t possibly have the baby. I shall have to have an abortion.’
He pleads with her, but it is no use. He makes the arrangements, gives her the cash, and the manservant, who likes to be called the chauffeur, takes her off to the clinic.
The Editor has a painful vision of his future vanishing down the plughole with swirling pink finality; but it only makes him more conscious of the present and he insists on visiting Audrey twice a week. Sometimes she won’t let him into her bed – ‘Since you made me have the operation, I have become sexually anaesthetized. It is not just a matter of indifference to me now – more like revulsion –’ but she does let him stay in the house. He finds that when he insists, she complies. This is, for him, a great and useful discovery. Although if he presses too hard, he discovers, her personality disintegrates altogether, like a blob of mercury flying into bits, and when gathered together again, has incorporated flecks of dust and foreign matter which take yet more getting used to.
Once, when she complains about the cost of the food he eats when he stays overnight, and refuses to give him an egg for breakfast, he points out that as he pays the food bills, the mortgage, the electricity, laundry and servant bills, he is entitled to as many eggs as he pleases. What’s more, he suggests, if she wants him to go on doing these things, she had better cook his breakfast graciously. Audrey gets as far as cracking a large brown egg into the pan before dissolving into tears, accusing him of blackmail, and becoming too hysterical to continue the cooking process. Still, she did crack the egg, and he considers this an advance.
At his wife’s home he sits down to a properly laid, three-course, punctual breakfast every morning, the eggs peppered and served with vinegared butter; and every morning boredom makes his very mouth muscles limp, so that coffee trickles down his chin, and his wife can watch with fastidious delight and disgust, pleased to be able to tell herself that if he finally goes for good, she has lost very little.
And here he is – he knows it – trying to make Audrey behave like a proper woman; like his wife.
Audrey is upset by his insistence on a cooked breakfast.
‘All my life,’ she complains to Jocelyn, ‘people have been taking advantage of me. This terrible man! He treats me as if I was a menial, but I have a brain like a man’s – everyone tells me so at work. What a terrible fate it is, to pass from life with Paul to life with this bully.’
‘It didn’t just happen,’ says Jocelyn. ‘You did it. You chose it.’ It is Jocelyn’s refrain nowadays, spoken faintly from depths of unfathomable boredom. She likes to listen to the tales told her by her friends: it is as if they stretch their hands down towards her, trying to raise her to the light again. Her little boy is sleepless and bad-tempered. She tries to love him but she can’t. He has Philip’s face, and watches her with Philip’s eyes – or is it with the eyes of that other man, long ago?
Jocelyn wrote to Miss Bonny when Edward was born. She had a letter by return. Miss Bonny now breeds dogs in the Lake District. Miss Bonny told her – why? as a cautionary tale? – about a wilful spaniel bitch who managed to mate with a collie, and then fortunately aborted. Later, properly mated with a spaniel, one of the pups was unmistakably collie. ‘Female fidelity,’ writes Miss Bonny, ‘is the cornerstone on which the family, the heredity principle, and the whole of capitalism rests.’ Virginity, thinks Jocelyn has gone to Miss Bonny’s head, and she throws the letter away. But she’s upset.
Jocelyn leaves the electric blanket on in Philip’s bed during one of his weekend absences, and it bursts into flames. The fire brigade has to be called. One of the attendant policemen, kindly staying behind to help clear up, propositions her. Jocelyn, these days, is beautiful enough in her chilly fashion. Made distraught and dirty by flames, smoke, and fear, she must appear, to the policeman, a likely lay. Jocelyn declines his offer with a haughty disdain which does not disconcert him at all.
For months afterwards, lying sleepless, waiting for Edward to stop crying and sleep, or wake and start crying, the policeman enters her fantasies, fully-clothed, brandishing his truncheon like a phallus, bullying, humiliating. The more extreme her sexual fantasies, the more in her head she moans and squirms in masochistic frenzy, while lying still and motionless in her bed – the more remote and frozen does she become by day.
Jocelyn handles Edward as if he was a rather strange, noisy doll. She does what is necessary for his survival, and little more. She can hardly bear to be touched by Philip.
Philip drinks later and later at the Watson and Belcher club. Drinks are free. The rumour goes the firm are trying to save paying out on their pension scheme by killing off the staff with drink at an early age. Philip begins to look quite old, and has a puzzled air.
Jocelyn is glad that Philip is so seldom at home. She likes to sit by herself in the evenings; or with her women friends. Her snobbish fit has passed. She goes round the corner to C. & A. for her clothes. She has given up Harrods. She makes no move to have the bedroom re-decorated, liking to lie in the smoky ruins and dream of rape and destruction. Eventually Philip complains. So Jocelyn hires a fashionable firm of decorators to re-do the whole house, and not just the bedroom, in pop-art style. The bill, in the end, is £2,500, which Philip does not have, and nor does she. Philip is angry. He hates the look of the house. He had thought, when he first saw it, that such crudity would at least be cheap. Jocelyn has never seen him angry, and it pleases her, and she spends a whole night actually sleeping in his bed, and wakes feeling like a whore. The feeling frightens her, and she retreats again into chilly respectability.
In the meantime, the bill remains a reality. It overshadows their lives. Philip, in punishing mood, takes to washing his own shirts to save the laundry bills.
When Jocelyn says she is perfectly prepared to wash his shirts herself, if that is what he wants, he says, ‘No. You are too much of a lady for that.’
Jocelyn shr
ugs. She doesn’t care what he thinks, or what he does.
Sylvia lives in a bed-sitting room, with her little daughter, and is supported by the National Assistance Board. She goes to the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital once a week for treatment to her ears, and once a week to Moorfields Hospital where they are investigating her sight. Her ability to see fluctuates, experts consider, in an unreasonable, even bizarre fashion. ‘When I’m cheerful,’ she assures them, ‘I can see perfectly well. When I’m miserable I’m blind as a bat. I will never be able to kill myself; I won’t be able to see to do it. Isn’t that something? You might almost say I did it on purpose.’
They refer her to a psychiatric clinic, and continue their investigations.
Sylvia’s vision improves. The sense that things are as bad as they can be reassures her. The National Assistance money comes regularly – so do the inspectors to ensure that she doesn’t have a gentleman caller. If she does, the money will be stopped. Thus protected, Sylvia begins to bloom. A woman neighbour looks after little Claire when Sylvia is visiting her clinics or the Welfare Offices.
Sylvia has a successful operation upon her right ear. Now she can hear when Claire cries, which is seldom, for Claire gave up crying as a bad job some time ago. Not that Claire bears a grudge against her mother, not at all. She loves her, puts her tiny arms around Sylvia’s legs and worships her.
‘They shouldn’t have made me have that abortion all those years ago,’ says Sylvia to her psychiatrist. ‘All I wanted was something to love. Everything went wrong because of that.’
‘It is not enough to give love,’ says the psychiatrist, ‘one must be able to receive it as well.’
It is surprising the things Sylvia hears, these days, even with one good ear.
Moorfields give up and provide her with contact lenses. Her eyes look large, misty and beautiful. She feels, as she clasps Claire to her, this gift of God, like a virgin again, untouched and full of hope.
‘The State,’ she says to Jocelyn, ‘must have spent at least £5,000 so far rehabilitating me. Why? What have I ever done to deserve it, besides merely exist? The State has done far more for me than my father ever did. I feel grateful, and that is something I have never felt in all my life before. Never gratitude, only resentment.’
(‘She has a new life now,’ says Jocelyn to Philip. ‘The State is her father and mother.’ But Philip does not want to discuss Sylvia. He likes talking about advertising matters, which Jocelyn feels too superior to discuss.)
Presently Sylvia takes a job in the Civil Service. She works patiently and methodically in the Department of Child Welfare. She moves into a Council flat. Claire goes to a State nursery by day, and seems happy. Sylvia’s ears and eyes are functioning; the psychiatrist says she need come to see him no longer. Sylvia sends a Christmas card home at Christmas, and receives one in return, and a doll for Claire. Her child is at last acknowledged.
‘It is perfectly possible to live happily without a man,’ says Sylvia to Jocelyn in gratified astonishment, but in the New Year she meets a quiet, gentle, kind, unmarried Probation Officer, and within three months is married to him.
They are married at St Pancras Registry Office. Sylvia and her Peter hold hands. Scarlet is there with Alec; and Jocelyn (Philip is at a conference); and Wanda, stumbling slightly for she has been celebrating, with Susan; and Audrey in a cartwheel hat and very short skirt; and Helen, at her most dramatic and beautiful in white velvet – Sylvia wears dove grey – escorted by a handsome, dark young man who clearly loves her. Sylvia’s parents send a telegram of good wishes.
Scarlet throws them a party in her Hampstead house. Alec has inherited a good deal of money. Scarlet has her sociology degree. She is hoping for a lectureship at the London School of Economics. Byzantia plays Beatles records very loudly in the basement, combs loose her flowing black hair, and tells her mother she means to change her name to Joan. She asks her uncle Simeon down into the basement, and there, hour after hour, attempts to seduce the bewildered lad. ‘Although his hair is long his heart is square,’ she complains to her mother. (Byzantia has a poetical sense, and writes long narrative poems in her Physics lessons at school.) ‘He keeps claiming incest, but that’s just an excuse. An uncle is as distant as a cousin, and cousins are allowed. Well, anyone’s allowed, now there’s the pill. Either he won’t, or he can’t. The whole incest taboo thing is on genetic grounds, after all, and since no one has to get pregnant these days, as a taboo it’s très outmoded. Personally I think incest is a very exciting thought. I don’t fancy Alec, I don’t know why. You should never have deprived me of my natural father, Mother.’
Jocelyn, Wanda, Audrey and Susan think Byzantia should be put on the pill, but Scarlet, Alec and Sylvia agree that she should not.
‘I am not filling up any daughter of mine with artificial oestrogen,’ says Scarlet. ‘I did not bring her into the world to drug her, neuter her, fatten her, and render her passive. Her own mother to turn her into a sexual object? And for what? What profound pleasure? A safe fuck with her own uncle?’
‘Half-uncle,’ says Wanda. ‘And what alternative do you suggest? If you think I’m going to look after a great-grand-child-cum-step-grandchild, you’ve got another think coming.’
‘Abstinence,’ snarls Scarlet, repairing to the many and varied pleasures of her own marital bed. ‘That filthy word! That’s what I suggest.’
Fortunately Byzantia loses interest in Simeon the moment he actually manages to achieve an erection, and falls in love with the dancer Nureyev, who at least is unattainable. She talks at length, as she follows her mother round the house, about her feelings, her actions and her reactions. She has a melodious voice, but it seldom stops: nothing is hidden, nothing is feared. Every subject, every relationship, every event, must be aired, discussed, categorized, rendered harmless, and then not even shelved for future reference, but simply forgotten.
‘Did I bring her up like this?’ Scarlet asks her mother, ‘or is it the world in which she lives?’
‘I see nothing wrong with her,’ says Wanda. ‘She lives in the present, that’s all. She means to be free and happy now, not some time in the future. You and I lived by saying “one day I am going to”. Byzantia says “Now! Let’s go!” It’s much healthier.’
Helen is entranced by Byzantia, and Byzantia likes Helen, and will go over to Helen’s Wembley Park flat on Saturdays to visit; they will take Alice for walks in the park, and feed her ice-creams, or bring her over to tea with Scarlet, or with Jocelyn. But mostly Byzantia likes the ritual of having tea with Helen – the white embroidered tablecloth, the flowered porcelain cups and saucers, tiny cucumber sandwiches, the iced cake, the afghans – little chocolate biscuits with a half-walnut on top of each – and Alice finely dressed and curled. Alice is a rather nervous, chattering little girl, who breaks into dance when she thinks no one is looking, bowing and swaying like a very young sapling swept by a gale.
Helen has tried. She has done what she can do to build a new life. She goes to parties, makes friends; allows herself to be taken out, wooed, even bedded. But there is a dusty film over all experience. She sees with dead eyes, hears with dead ears. She moves herself through the world like a puppet. She pulls strings to make herself dance, go to fortune-tellers, play with her child.
Presently X seeks her out. He says, ‘Let us be friends,’ and stays the night from time to time. Helen’s nightie is yellow scattered with white stars. She pretends she is a girl again. She pulls the strings that make her love. She loves. If anyone asks her, she says she loves.
He says, ‘Perhaps one day we will get married.’
‘When?’ she asks.
‘When we have grown new skins,’ he says, ‘renewed ourselves like the snakes we are. It takes seven years, I believe.’
They go on holiday to the Isle of Skye. Helen climbs a mountain, stands on the edge of a precipice and teeters.
‘Not here,’ she says, presently.
‘Not here,’ he says. He hasn’t moved. ‘Besi
des, look at the sky. It is beautiful.’
Helen looks at the dusty sky.
‘Besides,’ he says, ‘who would look after Alice? I have no gift for children. I do not like them.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Who would look after little dusty Alice?’ and he thinks he has won. His other children live with a sister of Y’s, whose husband is an ex-R.A.F. man. They run a paper shop in Essex.
After the holiday he goes back to the village and his Barbara, who never has visions of self-destruction, or urges to suicide. She is shocked at the very thought. When she is depressed she makes jam or a batch of cakes. ‘I have my own ways of being creative,’ she says, and he finds such presumption amusing and even touching.
‘One day,’ he says to Helen – he visits her once a month or so, when he has business in London, ‘we will live together. We might even marry, with the full rites of the Church.’
‘When?’ she asks.
‘One day,’ he says. He no longer talks about Y. Helen thinks it might be true. One day he will marry her. Days slip into days. Now when she looks in a mirror, she sees herself as dusty, too, not just the world around her. She has been in mourning for too long. She complains to Scarlet.
‘It’s no good,’ says Scarlet. ‘You must break with him, never see him again. The world is full of men. You have so much to offer. You are still young; you are handsome, Alice is an asset, not a liability.’
‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I am thirty-six. I am going off.’
‘Your life is only half-way through.’
‘I am not interested in the second half.’
‘You need to meet a proper man.’
‘There is only one man for me, and that is X. I cannot get interested in the others. God knows I try. I went out to dinner with a young man; and there was a woman at the next table who looked familiar. I realized it was Y. It wasn’t really, of course. How many tall pale women there are in the world; I’d never realized. After that I had nothing to say to him, and he lost interest. When there is something so enormous to be said, you see, which can’t be said, then silence is the only possibility.’
