by Weldon, Fay
Gwyneth is horrified to have caused so much trouble. She withdraws her request, but the Leacocks mull over it for weeks. They seem unable to let the incident go, gnawing at it as if they were starving and had been at last offered a bone.
If the problem is money, Mr Leacock says, Chloe could be allowed to clean the guests’ shoes – there are eight guest bedrooms by now – for two shillings a week.
‘It’s not the money—’ says Gwyneth—
‘If the problem’s tiredness,’ says Mrs Leacock, descending the stairs all of a tremble, ‘I can get hold of some Ministry of Food Orange Juice. They’re selling some off cheap in Stortford – too much preservative so the babies won’t drink it – but perfectly all right for adults. That’ll perk you up.’
So Gwyneth doesn’t get her extra afternoon off. But before Chloe starts work on the shoes each morning, she is given a spoonful of thick orange syrup, tart with sulphuric acid, from the crate Gwyneth now has to find room for under her bed.
One winter morning, groping for Chloe’s mouth in the dark – blackout curtains are tacked over the windows at night – Gwyneth laughs.
‘You have to laugh,’ she says. ‘It’s a funny old life.’
Ha-ha.
So now, when the Portuguese waiter brings a Dubonnet instead of a Campari, in a not very clean glass, Chloe says nothing. She is aware that he especially dislikes women customers, seeing it as a humiliation to have to serve them. She is aware that he is overworked, underpaid, exploited and helpless in a strange land, and that the greatest insult of all is her awareness of these things.
And still she sits there.
17
At twelve-fifty Marjorie arrives at the Italiano. She is dressed in expensive leather but manages to look not so much erotic, as fearful that the weather might turn. Chloe, who is tall and very slender, and has small hands and feet, and a refined and gentle face, and short cropped dark hair, wears a pale silk blouse, and pale suède trousers. She spends a lot of Oliver’s money on clothes, ever fearful that the days of tablecloth dresses, holed by cigarettes, might return.
‘You’re looking more like a boy than ever,’ says Marjorie. ‘Do you think you should?’
Marjorie carries a bright green plastic launderette bag, stuffed full of damp washing.
‘And we can’t possibly sit at this table,’ says Marjorie. ‘Are you mad? We’re practically in the Gents.’
‘Don’t make a fuss,’ begs Chloe, but Marjorie has them removed forthwith to a table near the window. She stows the launderette bag beneath her chair, and beams at the waiter, but he remains hostile. They order antipasto. He brings dried-up beans, hard-boiled eggs in bottled mayonnaise, tinned sardines and flabby radishes prettily arranged in bright green plastic lettuce leaves.
Marjorie eats with relish. Chloe watches in wonder.
‘Why don’t you kill her?’ asks Marjorie, meaning Françoise. ‘I can let you have some tablets.’
‘I am perfectly happy, Marjorie,’ says Chloe. ‘I don’t suffer from sexual jealousy. It’s a despicable emotion.’
‘Who told you that? Oliver?’
‘We all live as best we can,’ says Chloe, ‘and surely we are entitled to take our sexual pleasures as and when we want.’
‘Yes, but they’re getting the pleasure and you aren’t.’
‘I’m not a highly-sexed person, these days.’
‘Who says so? Oliver?’
But Chloe can hardly remember, of her and Oliver, who said what first.
‘I behaved very badly towards Oliver,’ says Chloe. ‘If this is his revenge it’s very mild. I can endure it. I would rather not talk about it. Whose is the washing?’
‘Patrick’s.’
‘I thought you’d stopped that kind of thing,’ says Chloe.
Marjorie is looking tired. It is one of her bleeding days, Chloe can tell. Her face is drawn and tired, and her hair is a wayward frizz.
‘Someone has to do it,’ says Marjorie.
‘Not necessarily,’ says Chloe. ‘He could leave it until the council issued a compulsory fumigation order.’
‘Patrick’s not as bad as that,’ says Marjorie.
‘I may be looking like a boy,’ says Chloe, ‘but doesn’t it seem strange that you, a high-powered television producer, should be doing Patrick’s laundry? You aren’t married to him. You don’t even sleep with him.’
‘How do you know?’ inquires Marjorie. ‘Though of course you are right. How can I have a sex life? I bleed all the time. What upsets me is the way his other lady friends behave. A lot of them must have automatics and I don’t see why they shouldn’t take their turn. If they’re strong enough to go down those steps – and lately the local hippies have been using the area as a shit-house – they’re strong enough to face his washing. All my stuff goes to the laundry – but I haven’t the nerve to send his as well. It’s not the money which stops me – it’s the humiliation.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ says Chloe, ‘I’d rather not talk about Patrick either. It’s unlucky.’
Patrick Bates lives in a filthy basement room and paints pictures in the half-dark. They fetch a good deal of money – although not quite so much as they did at the height of his fame, ten years ago. Patrick is reputed to be very wealthy, although he swears he burns the money instead of banking it. Certainly he spends very little. Since the death of Midge his wife he has become more and more eccentric. He danced on her grave when she died.
Patrick’s paintings were always small: now they are becoming miniature. He will confine a whole seraglio on a canvas marked out by a bread-and-butter plate and use cosmetic brushes to apply the paint. He is a miser. He scrounges food and clothes. He looks older these days than the forty-seven he is. His cheeks have sunk over toothless gums – he won’t spend money at the dentist. He pulls out his own teeth if they ache.
Chloe has not seen Patrick for nine years. Not since she went to visit him to ask for some money towards Kevin and Kestrel’s upkeep – Oliver was chafing under the burden of supporting them – and came away with Imogen instead.
Now she prefers not to talk or think about Patrick. She wants him out of her life. She wants him to keep away from the children. He is elemental, disruptive and mischievous. He has moved through her life like the Angel of Death, disguised sometimes as a malicious gnome and sometimes like Pan himself.
‘What was he doing, the Great God Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?’ she says now to Marjorie. They learned the poem by heart, at thirteen, competing for an elocution prize. Chloe won.
‘What indeed? We have all always wanted to know that,’ says Marjorie tartly. ‘And as for Patrick, you ought to talk about him. He is all those children’s father.’
‘Sometimes half a father is worse than no father at all,’ says Chloe. ‘And they have dozens of his paintings on the wall, so his presence is always with them, along with his genes. Oliver will keep buying them, in spite of everything. And you can get so many on a wall, I sometimes think there will be no end to it.’
‘Patrick will drink himself to death, and then there’ll be an end to it,’ says Marjorie.
Chloe is not sorry to hear this.
‘And then Oliver will have the largest collection of Bates paintings and Bates children in the whole country. He’ll like that.’
‘It’s not funny,’ says Chloe. She wishes she had not come up to London.
‘Perhaps Oliver wishes to corrupt the children,’ persists Marjorie. ‘And that’s why he buys so many. Apart from just wanting to annoy you, of course.’
Patrick paints women in all shapes, conditions and positions. Chloe has never considered them to be a depraving influence in the house. Oliver told her, in the days when he played poker with Patrick, and told her things and she believed them, that all Patrick’s latent generosity was revealed in his work.
‘Why should Oliver want to annoy me?’ asks Chloe.
‘Heaven knows,’ replies Marjorie. ‘If it was in script form I could tell you. As
it’s real life I have no idea.’
She becomes gloomy, quite suddenly, as was always her way.
‘I hate my life,’ she says. ‘Everything through a glass darkly, and the only reward lousy lunches in lousy cafes with friends too busy making a mess of their lives to care what happens to me.’
‘I care,’ says Chloe, who has known Marjorie too long to be embarrassed by such speeches. ‘I thought you liked your work, anyway.’
‘My work? My work is nothing. Flickers on a screen. I’ve worked so hard to get where I have and now it seems to mean nothing. Just four different offices in as many weeks, arguments about whether or not I’m entitled to a carpet, and an executive producer over me instead of a producer. They’ll never trust me. Why should they? I can’t take their beastly flickers seriously. It’s not real life. I tell them so and they look offended.’
‘You are living the life you chose,’ says Chloe. ‘You should have married and had children.’
‘I didn’t, so I couldn’t. I shall never have what I really want. I am one of nature’s dead-ends. I am a walking Black Hole. I have a hollow inside me. a bottomless pit, and you could shovel all the husbands and children in the world into me, and still it wouldn’t be filled up. It’s the same with you, and the same with Grace. We none of us will ever get what we needed, I wish a bomb had dropped on us, and put us out of our misery.’
Marjorie, Grace and me.
What was it we needed?
Not much. Perhaps only the fathers and mothers with which we started. Perhaps to own and not to disown us. Mothers to love us, and put themselves out on our behalf. To relinquish life as we grabbed hold of it. And smile as they did so.
Failing that, what do you get?
Marjorie, Grace and me.
Little Marjorie, tagging along, always reproachful. Just occasionally scouring the equanimity of the day with some excoriating remark. Should she be forgiven?
‘The barmaid’s daughter,’ Marjorie calls Chloe, coming home from school the day Chloe wins the elocution prize. ‘You can always tell she’s coming by the smell of beer.’
It isn’t true, of course. Gwyneth and Chloe are the most frequent washers Ulden has ever seen. They soap, they rub and scrub and poke, and rinse their bodies clean. They even trade in butter coupons for soap. Between their toes and behind their ears and under their breasts, and in their navels, above all in their navels, all is clean and pure. They rub and scrub away at guilt and resentment and restlessness, and in the end they wear them thin.
And how proud they are, the pair of them, enduring and forgiving to the end. They have a row of boxes on the window sill, each with its share of coins. For gas, light (their room is metered), books, fares, dinner money, pocket money. Sitting in their parlour, counting out their money. While the king sits somewhere else, on someone else’s bed, eating bread and honey. Mr Leacock.
He drinks too much. His face is flushed. His hand is broad and firm. He lays it on Gwyneth’s arm, and she trembles and smiles. Chloe sees.
‘Poor man,’ says Gwyneth. ‘His wife isn’t good to him. It’s a dreadful way to live.’
Understand and forgive, says Gwyneth. Understand husbands, wives, father, mothers. Understand dog-fights above and the charity box below, understand fur-coated women and children without shoes. Understand school – Jonah, Job and the nature of the Diety; understand Hitler and the Bank of England and the behaviour of Cinderella’s sisters. Preach acceptance to wives and tolerance to husbands; patience to parents and compromise to the young. Nothing in this world is perfect; to protest takes the strength needed for survival. Grit your teeth, endure. Understand, forgive, accept, in the light of your own death, your own inevitable corruption. What is there to want that’s reasonable to want? How can wanting be reasonable, when soon you’ll be dead? Await that day with composure and dignity, that is all you can do.
Oh mother, what you taught me! And what a miserable, crawling, snivelling way to go, the worn-out slippers neatly placed beneath the bed, careful not to give offence.
18
The plastic lettuce leaves have been empty for a long time. The waiter avoids Marjorie’s eye. Marjorie, who is always better in adversity, quite perks up. And thus the conversation goes.
Marjorie Will you be seeing Grace this afternoon?
Chloe Yes.
Marjorie (Put out) I’m glad you could find time for me, then. I’m surprised you bothered.
Chloe Don’t be silly.
Marjorie I don’t see much of Grace, these days. She’s sorry for me and I’m sorry for her, but she always wins.
Chloe She asked after you.
Marjorie Big deal. Is she still with her infant porn king?
Chloe He isn’t an infant. He’s twenty-five.
Marjorie I suppose we must be grateful he’s not seventeen. You’re not denying he’s a porn king? He makes skin flicks.
Chloe He doesn’t. He makes very good, very sensitive films. When he can raise the money.
Marjorie Who says so? Oliver?
Chloe Yes.
Marjorie He’s one of Oliver’s hangers-on, I believe.
Chloe Why are you so against Oliver?
Marjorie Because I’m hungry and the waiter’s being bloody. And because he makes you unhappy.
Chloe No he doesn’t. Men don’t make women unhappy. Women make themselves unhappy.
Marjorie Who says so? Oliver?
Chloe Yes.
The waiter takes away the plastic lettuce leaves and brings the spinach and Greek sausage Marjorie maintains is the speciality of the house. It has been kept a long time, under a hot grill, and the sausage frizzles on the plate, and the spinach, once aswill, is now riveted in a green crust. They eat.
Marjorie When you see Grace do tell her I’m without a gentleman friend.
Chloe Why should I?
Marjorie It will make her happy. I do want Grace to be happy.
Chloe grits her teeth and chews her sausage, and says nothing.
Marjorie I don’t really mind Grace being happy. It’s just she always has such a good time. I know it’s at other people’s expense, trample, trample on all and sundry. I just wish I had the courage. Perhaps I could have a baby, while there’s still time and give it to you, Chloe?
Chloe No thank you.
Marjorie You see what I mean. I suppose she’s just off somewhere?
Chloe Cannes.
Marjorie What a lovely way to live. Litigate in London and copulate in Cannes. She always did have everything.
Chloe Not really. You took a lot of it.
Marjorie What do you mean?
Chloe Esther and Edwin. You stole their affection.
Marjorie It wasn’t what I wanted.
She seems quite startled. It makes a change.
‘Isn’t this sausage good,’ says Marjorie, automatically, chewing hard. It is her habit, while marking time in her head, to praise whatever appears before her. ‘Oh jolly dee,’ Marjorie would cry, back in the Ulden days, as Esther served up the stiff red blackberry jelly everyone hated. ‘Scrumptious,’ as the boiled onions appeared, knobbly beneath the lumpy white sauce, which Esther made with lard, grey flour, milk powder and water.
And everyone suffers for Marjorie, so transparent are her pains, so noble her efforts to be good and happy.
Family life at The Poplars. Making England what it is. The backbone of the nation, set rigid against change.
Esther likes to save things from corruption. She makes cold sago pudding into soup by adding tomato sauce and salt. She makes jam from the over-ripe sodden plums in the grass at the end of the garden. She presses flowers to save them from decay. She turns and re-turns the sheets to stave off the inevitable holes. She prays and prays for her soul to be saved, and that Marjorie, Grace and Chloe should be good and happy. She prays that Edwin should be forgiven.
When Edwin is away fishing or seeing his solicitors, Esther is brisk and efficient. When he returns, she lapses into a vague clumsiness, letting the saucepans
burn, the baths overflow: she trips and sprains her ankle.
There comes a time when all is not well with Edwin. His Home Guard troop is incorporated into a larger unit, and he loses his command. The blow drives him back into the Rose and Crown, from which, encouraged by military responsibilities, he has been diffidently emerging, like a mole into the light of day. And back in the Cosy Nook, alas, all is not as it should be. Sometimes a trooper or a common airman will take over the corner seat which he regards as his, and will not vacate it even on request. His perfectly ordinary and patriotic remarks extolling Churchill’s conduct of the war will on occasions, if there’s a particularly low crowd in the bar, be met by a gale of laughter. Sometimes, too, the beer runs out.
Edwin ages ten years in as many months. Alcohol traces pink stress marks over his face. His moustache turns grey. He suffers from fits of temper, depression, asthma, and acute irritation with his wife. And his stomach, normally tough enough to cope with even Esther’s cooking, now revolts at the very thought of dinner.
He becomes an expert in domestic sadism.
Envisage one Sunday, not untypical of those months, when distress, frustration and despair swirled in Edwin’s mind and distorted his view of the world and the people that inhabited it.
The sun shines. It is high summer. The sea calls. There is enough petrol in the tank to get the car to the coast and back. Esther has made sandwiches with real butter – having saved everyone’s ration for a week – and bloater paste. Chloe has provided four hard-boiled eggs – given to her mother by a hard-drinking farmer, in the vain hope of preferential treatment on days when beer is short and the whisky run out. Grace has put on her best dress – red cotton spotted with blue, and Marjorie has swept out the Riley and polished its real leather seats. They have borrowed a beach-ball from neighbours, and with difficulty, for girls grow apace and clothing coupons are short, have acquired decent swimming suits for everyone.
