by Weldon, Fay
‘Why, come to that,’ says Scarlet, ‘did you go along with him in the first place? What kind of revenge was that?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I just don’t know. It was the end of our marriage. We limped along together, returned to our separate beds, for a month or so. I could not forgive him, yet I did not know what I had to forgive him for. It was my doing as much as his. Yet, because he was my husband, I had expected him to save me from myself. But why should he? I reminded myself of Edward in a rage, hitting another three-year-old on the head and shrieking “Be my friend!”
‘Edward. That was the other thing. The accident I’d been working up to. All those accidents, like one’s life, becoming less funny and more bitter as time goes on. I was bathing him, and forgot to put the cold water in, and lowered him into scalding water. There is, of course, no such thing as an accident. I did it on purpose to my child, because he looked like Philip.’
‘He doesn’t look in the least like Philip,’ says Scarlet. ‘Or not much, anyway.’
‘I stayed with him in hospital. I would have died myself to save him the pain. Yet it wasn’t love. It was the maternal instinct. There is no credit in that. It’s just another kind of animal thing.’
‘Is there credit in love?’ asks Scarlet.
‘Well, more,’ says Jocelyn, ‘if not much. Anyway, sitting beside his bed I envied Helen for the first and last time in my life. He was going to have those scars for ever, and I was going to have to live with him, and there was to be no more escape.’
‘The scars hardly show,’ says Scarlet. ‘You don’t notice them at all.’
‘I do,’ says Jocelyn. ‘All other feelings are luxuries, you know. Love, hate, lust, despair, hope – once one is a mother one has no business feeling any of them. They are inappropriate to one’s state. All the same, within a couple of weeks of Edward leaving hospital, I met and was in bed with Ben. I knew by then, thanks to Mr Rigby, that there are other universes to inhabit, and that I was really just like any other woman, and deserved as much and as little; and once I knew that, all kinds of reasonable, sensible things became possible.’
Down Among the Women
My name is Jocelyn. I sit in the park and consider the past, and what became of us all, and how little the present accords with our expectations of it. Hockey One, Hockey Two, Hockey Three and away! Oh, Miss Bonny, you and I, running for the bus and laughing, crackling over the winter ground. You and I, caught up for ever and ever in our moment of time, like flies trapped in amber.
Edward is over at the swings now, with little Sylvia, who is my favourite child. I can pick him out – he wears a red woollen cap which Audrey knitted for him in her domestic days – it was far too big then; it fits now, five years later. Perhaps Scarlet is right, and it is only to me that his scars seem so disfiguring? Perhaps he could stay at home, not go away to school, and I could abandon my last pretensions to gentility? I could hand Philip back the school fees and stop trying to get all I can out of him. Perhaps the next time Edward comes homing in to me and stares at me in his absent way and smoothes my hair away from my face as he talks, I will not have to push him away, or tell him he’s a big boy now. Perhaps I will just be able to sit, and accept.
There, I did it. I put my arm round him and smiled, and he smiled back. Every day he looks less and less like Philip – except of course when he’s in a bad temper. And that isn’t really so often.
One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.
I sit like a Roman matron, my cloak around my Edward and my Sylvia, and stare out into the dissolving universe. It’s getting dark. Soon it will be time to go home, and I will cook dinner, like all the other women in the world – at least to date.
For let me report a conversation I overheard between Scarlet and her Byzantia. I do not see Byzantia cooking dinner.
Byzantia, kind Byzantia, throws a party for her mother’s friends, for whom she has a weakness. She does not offer them marijuana, explaining to Scarlet that she considers them too unstable.
‘They would have bad trips,’ she says. ‘All lows, no highs.’
‘Perhaps so will you, at our age,’ says her mother.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Byzantia.
‘We haven’t done too badly,’ pleads Scarlet. ‘There’s me with Alec, Jocelyn here with her Ben, Sylvia with her Peter, and I daresay Audrey will bring her Editor, if she thinks he’ll have a bad enough time. And even your step-grandmother Susan will be able to bring your uncle Simeon.’
‘You amaze me,’ says Byzantia. ‘Fancy seeing success in terms of men. How trivial, with the world in the state it’s in.’
‘Merely as a symbol of success,’ pleads Scarlet, ‘I don’t mean to offer it as the cause.’
‘A symptom more like,’ says Byzantia, ‘of a fearful disease from which you all suffered. One of you even died on the way. I think the mortality rate is too high.’
When asked to define the disease, Byzantia cannot. Definitions, she says, are in any case no part of her business. It is enough to tear the old order down.
Byzantia, like her grandmother Wanda, is a destroyer, not a builder. But where Wanda struggled against the tide and gave up, exhausted, Byzantia has it behind her, full and strong.
Down among the women.
We are the last of the women.
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First published by William Heinemann in 1971
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1971
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781857984
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Chapter 1: Wanda, Scarlet and Byzantia
Chapter 2: Ask Your Father
Chapter 3: A Certain Sunday
Chapter 4: Scarlet is Brought to Bed
Chapter 5: Susan is Selfish
Chapter 6: Problems and Solutions
Chapter 7: Scarlet Shows Off
Chapter 8: Scarlet Goes to Market
Chapter 9: On The Move
Chapter 10: Sorting Out
Chapter 11: Crucifixions
Chapter 12: Nice People
Chapter 13: Solutions
Chapter 14: Down Among The Women
Down Among the Women
Copyright
They first met as children in 1940s London. Thirty years later, Marjorie, Chloe, and Grace make their way through an almost unrecognizable post-war society, coping with husbands, children, parents, and the messy business of life.
Table of Contents
1
Understand, and forgive. It is what my mother taught me to do, poor patient gentle Christian soul, and the discipline she herself practised, and the reason she died in poverty, alone and n
eglected. The soles of her poor slippers, which I took out from under the bed and threw away so as not to shame her in front of the undertaker, were quite worn through by dutiful shuffling. Flip-flop. Slipper-slop. Drifting and dusting a life away.
There is a birth certificate in Somerset House – where all our lives and deaths are listed, and all our marriages and our divorces too – which describes me as Evans, Chloe, born to Evans, Gwyneth, née Jones, and Evans, David, housepainter, of 10 Albert Villas, Caledonian Road, London, N1, on February 20th, 1930. Evans, Chloe, female. There is as yet, no death certificate there for me, though looking through the files which now crowd those once seemingly endless Georgian rooms, I shocked myself by half expecting to find it there.
Sooner or later, of course, that certificate will be added.
Understand, and forgive, my mother said, and the effort has quite exhausted me. I could do with some anger to energize me, and bring me back to life again. But where can I find that anger? Who is to help me? My friends? I have been understanding and forgiving my friends, my female friends, for as long as I can remember.
Marjorie, Grace and me.
Such were Chloe’s thoughts, before she slept.
2
‘There is no point in raking up the past,’ Chloe’s husband Oliver says to her the next morning, as she sits on the edge of his bed and watches him pour coffee from a French pottery jug. This is the day Chloe’s life is to change – in the way that the lives of calm people do change, through some alteration of attitude rather than of conduct. To Chloe, it seems an ordinary enough morning, except that she woke with a feeling of cheerfulness, conscious of the notion that she was finally to be allowed out of mourning for her mother’s death; and that now, when Oliver says that there is no point in raking up the past, she quite violently disagrees with him.
As for Oliver, he is glad that the night is over, not because he has slept badly but because he has slept too well, and been savaged by nightmares. They hover permanently round his brass bedstead and if he sleeps too deep, or too trustfully, they pounce.
Oliver wears no pyjamas. He is a slight, muscular, hairy man and the hairs on his chest are turning grey. Once he sat up in bed against brave white sheets, shiny black body hairs lying smooth against an olive skin, and thick dark head hair springing up in tight curls from his temples, stimulated, Chloe used to think, by the passion of his opinions and the fury of his dislikes.
Now Oliver props himself against brown easy-care Terylene and cotton pillow-slips, and his grey chest gives him a dusty and defeated look, and even his furies have mellowed, and the hair on his head, now sparse, falls downward in a perfectly ordinary way. His family do not notice the change in him. They imagine he is still king in the outside world, as he is in his own territory; but in fact he abdicated from that empire long ago. He rules at home and nowhere else.
Oliver has breakfast brought to him on a tray. He does not eat breakfast with his family. His nerves shrink from noise and good-humour first thing in the morning. When the thoughts and feelings of the night are still with him, the shriekings and posturings of the children – so many of them not his own – seem like some horrific charade especially set up to mock him.
So while Françoise prepares the children’s breakfast, it is Chloe’s custom to take Oliver his tray. After breakfast he will go to his study to write, or try to write, his novel.
‘No,’ agrees Chloe, lying in her teeth, ‘there is no point in raking up the past.’
He is not to be placated even by instant agreement.
‘Then why,’ he asks, ‘do you suggest I have nightmares because of something which happened to me in the past? It’s much more likely to be Françoise’s dinners. She will cook with butter. Instead of offering me psychological platitudes, why not try getting her to cook in oil?’
‘Françoise comes from Normandy,’ Chloe says. ‘Not the South. The butter habit is very deep.’
‘You don’t think she’s trying to kill me off with cholesterol?’ He is half joking, half serious. The nightmares have not yet fully retreated.
‘If she wanted to kill anyone,’ says Chloe, ‘surely it would be me.’
But Oliver is not sure. There is a coldness in Françoise’s eyes, as she lies beneath him, which belies the obliging languor of her limbs and the sweet moanings of her breath. He says as much to Chloe, but this time Chloe does not reply at all.
‘You’re not in a mood, I hope,’ says Oliver, meaning that he himself trembles on the verge of one.
‘No,’ says Chloe, kindly. She pulls the blind high and looks out across the garden. It is March. The winter weather has broken: the sun shines on the green tips of the daffodils, just beginning to show through the black earth. Beyond the green wall of the yew trees she can see the copper spire of the village church, brilliantly tipped with green verdigris. She is elated.
But now the sun is shining into Oliver’s eyes. He protests, and Chloe lowers the blind again to save him discomfort, but not before she has seen, on the blank pillow next to Oliver’s, a long dark hair, Françoise’s. Chloe removes the hair, and drops it in the wastepaper basket. Oliver does not like untidiness.
‘I’m sorry if I was bad-tempered,’ says Oliver. ‘If you mind about Françoise, you know you only have to say.’
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ says Chloe, and as far as she can tell she doesn’t.
But something has changed in her. Yes it has. Listen to what she is saying.
‘I think I shall go up to London today,’ says Chloe, who hates cities, crowds and cars.
‘What for?’
She has to think before she can reply.
‘To see Marjorie and Grace, I suppose.’
‘What for?’
‘They’re my friends.’
‘I am very well aware of that. Why do you choose such odd friends?’
‘One doesn’t choose friends. One acquires them. They are as much duty as pleasure.’
‘You don’t even like them.’ He is right. Chloe sometimes dislikes Marjorie, and sometimes Grace, and sometimes both at once. But that is not the point.
‘How do you know they’ll be free to see you?’ he goes on. ‘Other people won’t just drop everything because you happen to remember they exist. You’re very egocentric.’
‘I’ll have to take that chance.’
‘The fare is monstrous.’ Oliver says. ‘And who will look after the children?’
‘Françoise will.’
‘You mustn’t impose on Françoise. Her function is to cook and clean and run the home. It does not include childcare.’
He waits for his wife to say what else it does not include, but Chloe merely says, mildly, ‘The children are old enough to look after themselves.’
And so they are.
3
At half past nine Chloe suffers a spasm of fear at the prospect of going to London, and annoying everyone, and by five past ten, with the assistance of some inner fairy godmother, finally stirring from sleep, has regained her courage. She telephones.
Inigo, Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope are out on the lawn, marking up a badminton court for the season’s playing. Chloe’s fleshly children are the youngest and eldest. Inigo is eighteen, Imogen is eight. Chloe’s spiritual children, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope, come in between. Their cheerful, easy profanity drifts across the garden as Chloe tries to get a line through to London, and once in London to the BBC, and once at the BBC, through a succession of receptionists and secretaries, to Marjorie.
Who’d have believed it, thinks Chloe? That these children can use the words so lightly, which once were hurled, with such malignant ferocity, across their cradles. Bitch and bastard, Christ and cunt.
Although Chloe is fleshly mother only to Imogen and Inigo, all the children, she likes to feel, owe their existences to her. Four of them, Kevin, Kestrel, Stanhope and Imogen, share a common father – one Patrick Bates. Inigo has Oliver for a father. Stanhope has Grace for a mother. Kevin and Kestrel’s mother
Midge (Patrick’s legal wife) is dead. Imogen supposes, wrongly, that Oliver is her father. Stanhope is not told, for reasons clear to his mother Grace but no-one else, the true identity of his father. And as guilty adults have a way of protecting children from truths which are probably less painful than the lies, the children live in supposedly blissful ignorance that Stanhope and Imogen are not only half-brother and half-sister to each other, but to Kevin and Kestrel as well.
Or so Chloe believes they live.
Eventually the voice at the other end of the line is Marjorie’s.
‘Why are you ringing?’ asks Marjorie. ‘Are you all right? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ says Chloe.
‘Oh,’ says Marjorie. Is there a faint disappointment in her voice? ‘Did you have trouble getting through? I’ve been in four different offices in four weeks. If I was a man they wouldn’t dare. Do you know what they’re making me do now? The most boring series they can think of. Whole departments have toiled weeks to produce it. They told me so. A thirteen-part adaptation of a novel about the life of a middle-aged divorced woman, victim of modern times and a changing society. It is my punishment for asking to do Z-cars for a change. I like cops and robbers so they give me human suffering, not to mention staff directors who’re so permanent they can’t fire them.’
Chloe has little idea of what Marjorie is talking about, but is obliged to admire her for her capacity to cope with, and earn money in, the outside world. Marjorie, however, has neither husband nor children, which to Chloe seems a great misfortune, and emboldens her to ask, insignificant though she feels she is, a housewife up in London, knowing nothing of directors or contracts, if Marjorie will have lunch with her that day.
‘Is that French girl still with you?’ inquires Marjorie.
