by Weldon, Fay
Departure is timed for ten o’clock. As the hall clock strikes the hour, Esther and the girls assemble by the garage. (Edwin does not like to be kept waiting, at the best of times, and if he is, is quite capable of making the entire journey in total silence.) By ten-fifteen Edwin has not appeared.
Chloe, being the one least likely to provoke bad behaviour, is sent to the library to fetch him. Edwin sits staring morosely out of the window. He is dressed in his Home Guard uniform, not in the expected slacks and sports shirt.
‘We’re ready. Mr Songford,’ says Chloe.
‘Ready?’ He seems puzzled.
‘We’re going to the sea,’ she ventures.
‘The sea? The country is on the verge of disaster, and we are going to the sea? What madness is this?’
‘We’re waiting,’ says Chloe, humbly. Edwin strides out to the garage. Chloe trots behind. She is wearing her mother’s white sandals. They both wear size two and have difficulty finding shoes to fit their feet.
‘So!’ Edwin is jocular. His teeth gleam in a too wide smile. ‘Is our journey really necessary?’
‘Yes it is, daddy,’ says Grace. ‘Before I die of boredom.’
‘We’re all ready and waiting,’ says Esther. ‘And a lovely packed lunch! I can hear the sea calling us, can’t you?’
‘I polished the seats,’ says Marjorie.
Edwin stands, and smiles, and waits. Esther falls into the trap. She always does.
‘Are you going to wear your uniform?’ she asks.
‘Why, do you think I shouldn’t? Am I not entitled to it?’
‘Of course you are, dear. I just thought it might be a little hot. Such a lovely day!’
‘You must allow me to be the judge of my own body temperature.’ Edwin’s face begins to flush. A vein in his temple throbs. The children move away, pack themselves and their belongings into the car, and hope against hope.
‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ says Esther. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘But you have mentioned it,’ remarks Edwin. ‘So shall we investigate the remark? You want me to be the only man on that beach not in uniform. I am afraid I am not the sort of person to take such things lightly. You have organized this outing, Esther, solely to humiliate me in front of every whipper-snapper we pass. I see through you, Esther.’
‘But darling—’
‘Too hot in uniform! You are impossible.’
He stalks back towards the house.
‘Edwin,’ she calls plaintively after him. ‘Edwin, where are you going?’
‘To my study.’
‘What for?’
‘To write letters. Should I not?’
‘But we were going to the coast,’ she is in tears. ‘I’ve made sandwiches.’
Edwin shuts himself into his study. The girls clamber out of the car, embarrassed and disappointed. Esther pulls herself together, and says, brightly,
‘I’m afraid daddy’s tired. Shall we have a lovely picnic instead, down by the river? We can carry the basket. It isn’t far.’
But they shake their heads. They won’t. The day is spoilt.
Edwin remains in his study. Eleven passes, and twelve. What slim chance there is of his relenting, evaporates. The heat is oppressive. The house is silent. Esther fries the sandwiches for lunch. Grace draws. Marjorie does her homework. From under the study door drifts a miasmic cloud of hate, gloom and resentment.
Chloe goes home at tea-time to the Rose and Crown, and returns the eggs to her mother.
They are not good days for Edwin, or for anyone.
Sometimes Esther wonders if she could learn to drive, but the first obstacle, that of asking Edwin to teach her, is insurmountable.
Envisage now another scene, one summer Sunday some twelve years later, when Grace is in the middle of her dream marriage to Christie. (Grace had a dream marriage the way other women have – or don’t have – dream kitchens.)
Into the Mercedes, waiting in the drive, are packed Grace’s two little children – a pigeon pair – the Spanish nursemaid, a picnic hamper packed by Harrods (alia tempora, alii mores) and a case of champagne for the charming friends they mean to visit that day in their cottage on the Sussex coast.
Grace leans, all warm and contented, against the long bonnet of the Mercedes. Her high plump bosom is delicately revealed by the low-cut white cotton dress which she wears. She stares at the sky, and watches the birds. Does she think of the past, of her mother and father, and other outings, in other years? Probably not. Grace makes few connections between then and now.
But here comes Christie, leaping down the steps, all vital executive energy and financial acumen. Six feet one inch, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, with a clear-cut Aryan face, her highly desirable husband.
He stops short, seeing Grace. She smiles at him. It is a slow and languorous smile; she offers him a remembrance of past pleasures; she has not smiled at him like that before, nor will she again.
The night before has been rich with strange untoward sexual events (thanks to a careless remark dropped by Grace’s gynaecologist) as new to Grace as to Christie, who had thought the missionary position – he on top of her – with his eyes closed, to mark the limits of married conduct, and anything else the mere substance of pornography. Women, like men, the gynaecologist told Grace, have orgasms, and though her mouth could scarcely bring itself to utter the word aloud, so rich, strange and dangerous a concept it seemed, she had whispered the information into Christie’s ear as they lay together in their marital bed.
In the morning, this feat accomplished, she is languid, replete and gratified. But what is Christie saying? Why is he calling her names? He who so embraced and pleasured her in the night – and yes, at breakfast ate his bacon and drank his coffee in so unusually companionable a way – what are these words he uses now? Exhibitionist, slattern? What has she done? Her dress? Exposing her breasts like a tart?
But the day is hot. She chose the dress because the day is hot, and that is all, she swears – and not, as he alleges now, to seduce their host in his Sussex cottage, husband of her dearest friend. Christie is cruel, unjust, sadistic. Her happiness crumbles. The children cry. The nursemaid is white with horror.
Now, it is true that the host much admires Grace’s bosom. It is true that she would like to annoy her friend. It is true that the events of the night before and the power she then exerted over Christie, and which he now so fears and resents, have extended her erotic fancies towards all the men in the world, and not just her best friend’s husband. Christie is not so wrong as he in his poor cold heart suspects he is. So far as Grace is concerned she is totally innocent. She chose the dress because the day is hot; her eyes fill with tears. Christie has ruined her day, her life, her future. She stammers hurt and bitter words, and he stalks off silently to his office.
It is the first Sunday in seven months he has taken off from work, and see how she has ruined it?
Grace tells this story often, as evidence of Christie’s malevolence and general impossibility, and her own fortitude, for her response to the incident was, very sensibly, to learn to drive, and to pass the test first time. And since Christie would not let her drive the Mercedes in case she damaged the gear-box, she sold herself for fifty pounds to an Armenian violinist in his bedroom in the Regents Park Hotel, in order to buy a car of her own. Or so she said.
Though Christie’s second wife Geraldine, the social worker, said very differently.
‘I know for a fact,’ she said to Chloe once, ‘that Grace only passed the test on the fourth try. As for sleeping with an Armenian for money, that is typical of one of Grace’s sick fantasies – and part of her mental illness, I’m afraid, and further evidence, if any is necessary, that she is not fit to see the children at weekends. The Regents Park Hotel! Women just don’t behave like that, and if they did, I’m sure the hotel porter doesn’t let them in. It’s a very respectable place. I’ve been there to tea. And fifty pounds! Who would pay that much for Grace? Armenians are a very shre
wd race, the market price for prostitutes is three pounds, and our currency is not all that difficult to master. She is quite frigid, poor Grace, according to Christie, and that of course is part of her trouble.
‘As for that Sunday, Christie didn’t go to the office in a temper, but because he’d had a phone-call to say one of his buildings was falling down, and he was needed on site.’
This last statement certainly had the ring of truth. Christie was a civil engineer and his buildings were frequently falling down.
Chloe quite liked Geraldine, and was sorry for her, believing Grace when she said that Christie had married Geraldine, that respectable young woman, merely to gain custody of the children. And though Geraldine, at that time, possessed to a marked degree the cool and irritating smugness of the untried and childless wife, who knows that a little goodwill, a little common sense and a little self-discipline will solve all problems – be they matrimonial, social or political – Chloe knew that life and time would soon cure all that.
As indeed they did. Once the children were safely and securely adopted, and Grace had renounced all interest in them, Christie drove Geraldine out, and a long and humiliating process it was, and entered his day-long marriage to the greedy if blissful flower-child California; and thus Geraldine found herself the mother of two children whom she neither liked particularly nor had the means to support, and was no longer heard to make remarks such as –
‘No such thing as a bad child, only bad parents.’
or
‘People have only themselves to blame.’
– and was much the nicer for it.
19
By the time the waiter takes away their empty plates the Italiano has almost emptied. Marjorie, nevertheless, consults the menu and orders zabaglione for Chloe and herself. Marjorie never gives up, never saves herself, thinks Chloe. She invites trouble, in order to face it. She struggles in some monstrous swimming-pool of dire events, forever almost drowning, forever bobbing up again, reproachful and gasping for breath, and forever declining to stretch out her hand and be saved.
‘How’s your mother?’ inquires Chloe. It was Helen who pushed Marjorie into the pool, in the first place, and that’s why she won’t get out.
Yes. Listen to her now.
‘Mother? Mother’s marvellous!’ says Marjorie. ‘She’ll be seventy next week. She was in Vogue last month. ‘Didn’t you see? No? I thought you’d be sure to read Vogue. She gives fashionable dinner parties for the gay political crowd. All very camp. I don’t know if she knows that’s what it is, but it’s something for old ladies to be appreciated by somebody, isn’t it, and they all adore each other over the lace napery and the flower pieces and the Coq à la Tunisie cooked by a sublime little Suliman imported from the Bosphorus.’
‘I hope he washes the napery,’ says Chloe, to whom tablecloths have always been a burden, for her husband Oliver cannot digest food without one, and she has no washing machine.
‘I do them for her,’ says Marjorie. ‘I collect them on Sunday, do them by hand in luke-warm suds on Sunday afternoon, dry them in my little yard, and send them back in a taxi on Monday morning from the office. I wish I could move in with her and look after her properly but you know how independent she’s always been.’
‘You do quite a lot of washing, these days,’ says Chloe. ‘What with your mother’s table cloths and Patrick’s undies.’
‘What else do I have to do in my spare time?’ asks Marjorie. ‘And who else would do it?’
The zabaglione, astonishingly, is rich, warm and good. The waiter even smiles as he offers it. Perhaps it was shame, rather than resentment, which had so afflicted him. Marjorie smiles back. She has, after all, won a victory.
‘She could pay a laundress,’ Chloe ventures.
‘Oh no.’ Marjorie is shocked. ‘She has to be very careful. You know how worried the elderly become about their futures – having so little of it left, I suppose. She’s even having to sell the Frognal house.’
‘Not before time.’ Chloe has not liked Helen since she over-heard her commenting on Esther’s liberalism in letting her daughter associate with the village children. Chloe, that is, the bar-maid’s daughter. Or so Chloe assumed.
The Frognal house, scene of Helen’s early happiness with Dick, has been unoccoupied for the past fifteen years, while Helen toys with the notion of selling it. Occasionally hippies or squatters move in, and move out again, of their own accord.
‘She has a sentimental attachment to it,’ says Marjorie. ‘It’s hard for her.’
‘I expect it’s past repair now,’ says Chloe. ‘And that’s what she’s been waiting for. It will have to be pulled down, there’ll be planning permission for flats, and she’ll make a fortune.’
‘It’s not like that at all,’ says Marjorie. ‘Nothing could destroy that house. It’s solid concrete. She’s not a calculating person at all, she just needs the money.’
Over the years Helen has sold the paintings Dick bought in the twenties. She has done very well from them. Unfortunately the first editions, which would have fetched even more, were left under the leaky roof and eventually disintegrated.
When Dick left for the war there had been only one loose tile on the roof, but the anti-aircraft batteries on Hampstead Heath had shaken the ground and loosened thirty-two more. Or so a fire watcher, up on the roof with his bucket of sand, waiting for incendiaries, had once told Helen. And she, going up to the attic one rainy day, looking at those mildewing pages, could not bring herself so much as to move the volumes from beneath the drips.
His books. His fault. And only one chance for anyone.
‘I don’t know why you don’t live at Frognal,’ says Chloe to Marjorie, although she knows quite well why, and how painful the reason is. But as Marjorie gets warmer and happier Chloe finds herself becoming more and more disagreeable. ‘All that space going to waste.’
And ‘I hope your mother asks you to her smart parties in return for all that washing,’ knowing full well that Helen doesn’t.
And finally, ‘Do you wash Patrick’s sheets as well as his undies? The ones he uses with Lady This and Lady That while you wait outside?’
Marjorie seems pained rather than angry.
‘You’re not usually like this,’ she says. ‘There is something the matter. That’s why you wanted to see me. Well, we all know what it is. You’ve stayed married to the wrong man for twenty years, for reasons that have more to do with snobbery, greed and fear, than anything else.’
Chloe is silent. Presently Marjorie says,
‘I wonder why I keep coming to this dreadful place? The service is appalling, the food is rancid, the waiter is round the bend, and they put us at this draughty table on purpose.’
‘That’s right,’ says Chloe.
Marjorie begins to laugh. Chloe begins to snivel.
‘Oh Marjorie,’ says Chloe.
‘Oh Chloe,’ says Marjorie. ‘Nothing ever changes.’
‘Yes it does,’ says Chloe. ‘It must.’
But it doesn’t really. This is what it’s like now and then it was much the same. You ask for bread, and get given stones.
20
At last! Helen comes down to Ulden to visit her daughter Marjorie. How beautiful Helen is, how elegant, how timeless; how she charms Esther Songford and how she flirts with Edwin, laying a scarlet fingernail on his dusty lapel, mesmerizing.
She comes in a chauffeured car. She is all cream and roses. Her stockings are purest silk; her underskirt, just briefly showing, is lined with lace. Her eyes are wide and innocent in an oval face, her pale hair waves sweetly round her ears.
(Dick, far away, cold and hungry, dreams of Helen in the arms of enemy officers on the Library floor beneath a leaky ceiling, and well he might. Helen does not dream of Dick.)
‘Oh my dears,’ she says, ‘my dears.’ And she embraces all and sundry, but Marjorie somehow less than anyone. And Esther, who seldom touches anyone, is gratified and enchanted by the smooth warmth of Helen�
�s hand; and the feel of another cheek in soft proximity to her own, so gentle and affectionate, amazes her.
‘The times are so dreadful,’ mourns Helen, ‘this war is such a shocking business. I am grateful to you for looking after Marjorie. She has settled in so happily here.’
‘She can stay as long as she likes,’ says Esther Songford. How clumsy she feels, in her old brown skirt and cardy; how earnestly she wishes for Helen’s approval.
‘Well—’ says Edwin.
‘Just until we find somewhere out of London – such a frightening place – and I will send a guinea a week,’ says Helen. ‘It is the least I can do. It is difficult for me, of course. I am very much alone in the world. My huusband’s parents. I am afraid, disown his child. They are Jewish, you see, and very orthodox; and of course disowning her does save them money! I am sure it is no more than that. It hurts me, all the same.’
This is the first Marjorie has ever heard about her father being Jewish. Well, she shouldn’t be listening at key holes.
‘We’ll look after her,’ says Edwin. ‘Poor little Marjorie. By Jove we will, it’s the least we can do. Feed her up, make a man of her, put the colour back into her cheeks.’ He is distressed by notions of discrimination and unfairness. He is a nice man, to everyone but Esther. ‘London’s no place for a child, these days. I heard the East End’s taken a battering.’
‘The spirit of the people is incredible,’ says Helen. ‘They sing down in the shelters while all hell rages above them. I’m working day and night, you know. Well, we all have to work, these days. I help young mothers to cope. So many temptations, poor things. If a husband is conscripted, the wife’s allowance is only twenty-eight shillings a week! It is quite shocking. How can anyone keep a family on that? Well of course they can’t – and with so many soldiers on the loose in London. I’m afraid one fears a complete breakdown in morality. No, London is no place for a child.’
