by Weldon, Fay
‘But mother,’ says Marjorie, in the room somehow, pulling at her mother’s sleeve in the way that most infuriates, ‘all the other evacuees have gone back. I’m the only one left in the village.’
‘Marjorie,’ says Helen, ‘please don’t look gift horses in the mouth, when the Songfords have been so good to you. It’s dreadfully rude.’
Marjorie goes scarlet. Tears burst from her eyes.
‘I’m afraid she’s something of a grizzler,’ says Helen. ‘It’s her heredity, I’m afraid. A kind of permanent wailing wall.’
‘She’s a dear girl,’ says Esther stoutly.
‘Well that’s that,’ says Helen, ‘I must be off.’
‘You can’t stay to tea?’ asks Edwin. ‘We couldn’t tempt you with a slice of nut cake?’
‘I’d love to, but duty calls. I’m at my Young Wives Sanctuary tonight,’ says Helen. ‘I shouldn’t have come at all really, abandoned them, but I had to make sure Marjorie was settled and happy.’
‘Please stay, mother,’ blurts Marjorie. ‘It’s only lunch-time.’
‘Darling heart, don’t pester. We have to be back in London before dark. There’s a blackout, you know.’
The chauffeur opens the door for her. He is blond, young, healthy, handsome, and in some kind of uniform, though whether of private or military service would be hard to say.
Edwin sees her into the car, tucks her fur rug round her.
‘This war,’ she says, hesitant and intimate, ‘this war. So extraordinary. It’s changed my life. I was so selfish before. A blessing in disguise. What a place the world is – oh what a place!’
He gapes, enchanted.
The engine purrs. Marjorie comes running up.
‘Mother,’ she says, ‘what about father? Where’s father?’
‘I simply don’t know,’ says Helen, ‘but that means nothing. Letters, these days, just never get through. You can’t rely on a thing.’
‘But mother—’
Helen smiles sweetly and pats her daughter’s cheek and winds up the window and is gone.
But she has stirred something in the Ulden air.
‘Extraordinary,’ says Edwin to Esther over late-night cocoa. Esther makes it with water, not milk.
‘What is?’
‘Her age.’
‘What’s extraordinary about that?’ asks Esther.
‘She must be the same age as you, and look at her and look at you,’ and Esther is as distressed as Edwin, unsettled and restless, has meant her to be.
Silk petticoats lined with lace! Blond chauffeurs!
‘When I grow up,’ says Grace to Marjorie, before they go to sleep, ‘I’m going to be like your mother.’
Marjorie snivels in the next bed and doesn’t reply.
Lies and scarlet fingernails!
Half a mile away, in the room behind the Rose and Crown, Chloe lies awake in her bed. The sheets are coarse and the blankets are thin: the iron bed has rusty springs: the mattress is made of lumpy flock. Little Chloe wonders if she is doomed to live like this for ever. From the open windows of the Cosy Nook comes a gust of beery smoke and song. Down there her mother smiles, and serves, and cleans, and wipes, and disguises her distaste. Doors slam and voices shout. Out in the yard, caught short, beer-loaded men excrete, urinate and vomit. On Saturday nights, when the factory girls come down Stortford, the whole yard seems to heave and grunt with embracing couples. Chloe reads the Bible by torchlight.
‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when the evil days come not—’
But supposing they do?
Next time Helen has to come by train, and not by car. There is no petrol. But she is accompanied by a gallant Polish officer. He clicks his heels and bows and speaks no English. Now Helen too is in uniform. It is of enigmatic origin, and its khahi bulkiness serves to enhance her fragile charm. She looks as if she is in fancy-dress.
She is pale and trembly, and leaves the Polish officer for Esther to cope with, and takes Edwin off for a walk in the woods. And thus, more or less, the conversation goes:
Helen I feel you are my friend, I feel I can confide in you. And Esther too, of course. But somehow – a man, you know how it is when one needs advice. You don’t think Esther minds me carrying you off like this? I wouldn’t want to offend her for the world. I’m so indebted to her.
Edwin She’s got the Polish fellow. Fair’s fair.
Helen Yes. And the children. She loves the children, doesn’t she! Edwin, I’ve heard from Dick at last. I thought he was in Scotland, but no, they sent him to France. It must have been a mistake because no-one in their right mind would have sent Dick on active service. He’s far too much of an intellectual, and Jewish too. Sergei says they make terrible soldiers! Dick belonged to the Peace Pledge Union, you know. So did I, actually, but I think I was very much under Dickie’s influence. Is it a dreadful thing to say – but since he’s gone I’ve discovered myself. I was a Socialist, too, you know. Yes, I really was! I used to think the People were perfectly sensible, they just lacked education and one’s own advantages, but I begin to think they’re really very stupid. Sergei – he’s a Count, actually – says Communism is doomed by virtue of the stupidity of the working classes. At least I think that’s what he says – we talk in French. We both have a smattering. But the thing is, you see, Dick’s a prisoner of war, and I feel so ashamed. I know it’s not his fault but I can’t help feeling he’s taken the easy, well, actually the Jewish, way out. So passive and sneaky. He’ll be cosy as anything for the duration, being an officer and a gentleman, and safe as houses while the rest of us go through the bombings and the hardship. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t volunteer with just this in mind. It was such an odd thing for him to do. Do you think you could possibly break the news to Marjorie for me? I find it very difficult to talk to her about her father. You know he was unfaithful to me while she was being born and I nearly died?
Edwin finds it an incredible notion. So, plainly, does Helen.
Poor Dick, offered warmth, understanding and solace by Helen’s best friend Rhoda, a bouncy, rompy, ridiculous girl, chosen by Helen for light relief. What should Dick have done that night of Marjorie’s birth? Turned away by the nursing home matron, as he was – birth no business of his, a female concern, his own wife swelling and bursting and all the fault of his own brutishness, the doctors saying no sex during pregnancy bad for baby, and no sex for three months after the birth – bad for mother, and Helen always more than ready to believe anything that suited her? What should Dick have done, Rhoda’s friends (ex-friends) and Helen’s, asked? Why, turned his back resolutely on Rhoda, of course (sexual urges not being considered the driving force they are now, and seen as a weakness, not a strength), held his tongue, his breath, and kept his patience, and saved everyone from ruin.
So poor wounded Helen believed, who had bared her beautiful breast simply, one might imagine, in order to receive the blow, and who in any case always had difficulty distinguishing a symptom from a cause (she believed, quite sincerely, that Marjorie’s spots were the cause of her misery, and not the result). Hurt turned to moral outrage, thence into habit, and now at last to her advantage.
Edwin You poor plucky little thing.
Helen All the same, I want to preserve the child’s faith in her father. I think that’s so important. If I see too much of her, I am afraid my rancour may spill over and damage her innocence. There is simply nowhere for her to go. My parents are in Australia, and as for Dick’s – well, they always thought themselves too good for me, you know. Can you imagine, people like that? Sergei says their sort should be interned, the Jews are the real traitors. London is quite dreadfully dangerous now, but I must stay, I can’t run away, it is simply not in my nature. Mr Churchill says we all have to stay put, and help, and London needs all the help it can get, you’ve no idea! One half of the population refuses to leave the shelters, and the other half won’t go down. The first lot risk dying from disease, the others being blown or burned to bits. And the br
eakdown in morality! I’m working with the fallen mothers. I ask them back to tea, we play records; I show them that life can still be civilized, we don’t have to descend to the level of brutes. And such a trial keeping that enormous house clean — it’s almost impossible to find a cleaner, let alone keep one, without paying something monstrous. One woman asked one and sixpence an hour and she had dreadful varicose veins, she couldn’t possibly have earned it... now, Edwin, you naughty boy, we’d better go back. Esther will be wondering what we’re up to. I am so lucky, to have such good friends, and such a good home for Marjorie.
And they go back to the house, and Helen sweeps the Polish count away from an inspection of Esther’s roses, and pecks Marjorie good-bye, and Edwin quite forgets to tell Marjorie that her father is a prisoner of war, and Esther has a bad time for a day or two, while Edwin finds fault with her appearance, her cooking, her extravagance, her handling of the children, her very existence, and finally, provoked beyond endurance by her bewildered, suffering face, digs up her antirrhinum bed and lays down onions.
Chloe and Grace help.
21
In the summer of 1943 Marjorie goes up to London for the day, to visit her mother. It’s a Sunday. The Frognal house, built in 1933 by a leading architect, rather in the fashion of a concrete boat, with portholes instead of windows, now stands like some dingy ark stranded in a jungle of creepers and shrubs. All the young gardeners have been called up and all the old ones can find better-paid work.
But Helen is cheerful. She still entertains: there are more than enough guests. Assorted Polish officers on leave in London, one or two reformed friends left over from the Peace Pledge days; former struggling painters, now official war-artists, previous avant-garde writers, now earning good money as war correspondents – all take refuge in her house. Tradesmen, warmed by Helen’s charm, supply extra food in quantity and the hospitality is lavish.
Helen cannot leave her guests to meet Marjorie, who makes her own way to Hampstead from Liverpool Street Station on a bus which takes her through the still smouldering rubble of the City, and from the top of which she sees, half hidden by bricks, what she thinks at first is a sack and then realizes is the top half of a body. She wonders whether to draw the attention of the conductor, and then changes her mind. Someone must know. She does not want to look silly.
She tries to tell Helen about the body, but Helen is too busy to listen. She is telling her friends what an independent girl Marjorie has become, by virtue of living in the country and going to the village school. Marjorie, laying the table for lunch, overhears her mother talking to a friend, thus:
Helen Poor dear Dick! I don’t know what he’ll miss most in his prison camp. Sex, or culture. Can you imagine Dick without the Left Book Club, or the New Statesman or Apollo? All they ever get to see in those places is Tit-Bits and Esquire, I believe, sent in by the Red Cross. I’m afraid his mind will quite wither up and dry without its accustomed stimuli, and that’s not the only thing that will! He was never a one for inner resources.
Marjorie Mother?
Helen Run along, Marjorie.
Marjorie You mean father’s a prisoner of war?
Helen Yes of course he is, dear. Mr Songford told you.
Marjorie finds her father’s POW address by searching her mother’s rosewood desk. Every week she posts a lengthy letter to this address, copying out pages from Apollo, and the New Statesman, and whole stories out of Penguin New Writing; Chloe helps, churning out page after page when she should be doing her homework, and Grace – ‘quite the little artist’ as her teacher says – copies Henry Moore sketches and Paul Nash paintings on to airmail paper, and these too are enclosed. (Grace has an amazing facility for graphic mimickry: she will pick up a pencil and dash off a copy of someone else’s original, with half indifferent, half contemptuous pride.) Whether the letters get through, none of them knows. Certainly there is no reply. It doesn’t seem to matter.
‘I expect they’ve tortured him to death,’ says Grace, one day over tea. ‘You know what the Germans are.’
‘Be quiet, Grace. He’s an officer and a gentleman,’ says Esther, comforting, ‘that kind of thing only happens to the ranks. Don’t upset poor Marjorie.’
But Grace does if she can, and no wonder, Marjorie’s school report is startling. At the end of her first year in the Grammar School she’s top of everything, with Chloe running second. Grace gets the Art Prize and ‘Could do better if she tried’ for nearly everything else. And though Grace does have normal parents, and lives in her own house in a fairly normal way, these, with the years, appear less and less desirable attributes. Grace is limited to the reality of Edwin – choleric, open-pored and fallible. Marjorie with her missing father, and Chloe with her dead one, live in a world of might-have-been and might-yet-be.
Marjorie sends her school report to her mother, and gets a reply in which Helen quite ignores the report but says she is going to the States for a year to work for a Free French organization in New York – Will she tell Mr and Mrs Songford, please.
Marjorie does. The guinea a week has long since ceased arriving.
‘You should be doing some kind of warwork,’ is all Edwin says to Esther, ‘sitting round here on your backside all day.’
Esther rarely sits. It’s all patch and mend and make-do, these days. Every available blackberry is bottled; turnip pulp must be added to the jam to make it go further; custard must be set with golden syrup, not eggs – there are no eggs available; even here in the country, officials pounce, it seems, while they’re still falling from the hen. Only the supply of cabbage is unlimited. And, of course, the garden vegetables.
‘I’m singing for the troops at the concert,’ says Esther, roused to defiance at last by the injustice of his fault-finding. Before she married, Esther had plans to be an opera singer. Edwin is horrified.
‘You’ll make a fool of yourself,’ he says. ‘And me.’
But Esther persists, and Edwin tries to get the organizers to cancel her appearance. But they won’t, and Esther sings. She stands up in front of all those men, this middle-aged lady with her red, swollen hands and lost ambitions, and sings, of all things, a Brecht song. ‘The Ballad of the German Soldier’s Bride’:
‘And what did he send you, my bonny lass,’
it goes,
‘From Paris the City of Light?
From Paris he sent me a silken dress
A dream caress of a silken dress,
From Paris the City of Light.
And what did he send you my bonny lass,
From the deep deep Russian snows?
From Russia he sent me my widow’s weeds,
From the funeral feast my widow’s weeds,
From the deep deep Russian snows.’
Her voice is clear and firm and young, her delivery exact and confident. There is silence after she finishes. Then applause, on and on. She seems gratified but not surprised by the response she gets. She won’t sing an encore.
‘That’s enough,’ she says. ‘That will last me for ever.’
It has to.
‘Sometimes,’ says Gwyneth to Chloe, ‘you rub brass and find gold. Not often, but sometimes,’ and for once what she says sounds true to Chloe.
Edwin does not hear his wife sing or witness her triumph. He slips a disc a couple of hours before she is due to appear on stage, and takes to his bed, and afterwards is in too much pain to listen to anyone’s description of the event.
22
‘I know what the matter is with you,’ says Marjorie, as they wait for their coffee, ‘and with me. It’s the Stay Put poster. It has embedded itself in our minds.’
Oh yes. The Stay Put poster, on the notice boards of Church, Pub, School, Women’s Institute and Station, along with the Ministry of Food recipes for carrot cake and cod-and-potato pie.
‘What do I do?
– If I hear news that the Germans have landed? I stay put. I say to myself “our chaps will deal with that”. I do not say “I must get out
of here” whether at work or home, I just stay put.’
‘I stay put at work, and you stay put at home,’ says Marjorie. ‘What good little girls we are.’
Snip, snip, snip, goes the shopkeeper’s scissors round coupons and points. Little packets of margarine, smaller ones of butter, tiny squares of cheese pass over the counter. Melon jam and milk powder. That’s all for this week. Ration books get flabby with use. Identity cards to children, are a source of pride. So that’s who one really is! The suicide rate plummets. The standard of health soars. If you can’t fill up on chips, you have to on carrots. War babies grow inches taller than pre-war ones. Britain’s finest hour!
The buses are filled with turbaned women on their way to work in the munitions factory. The sweet-shop lady’s son is killed in action. The baker’s brother loses a leg. The gardener who once helped Esther with the herbaceous borders is posted missing. Regulars at the Rose and Crown, laughing, handsome, horse-playing young men from the air-field, fail to turn up at their usual time. Other young men take their place at the bar, leaning and crowding in the same way, ordering the same drinks. It is hard to tell them apart.
Sometimes Gwyneth lies in bed at night and cries. Why? Chloe does not know. For herself or for the world. In the morning she is brisk and competent again. Chloe and she follow the early-morning exercise classes on the radio as best they can in their tiny room. Chloe breaks her little finger hitting the wall as she swings her arm. Well, there’s a war on. Hardship is no longer one’s own responsibility.
A German bomber is shot down, and explodes a mile or so from the village. The charred remains, metal and human, are cordoned off. A week later Marjorie comes across a severed human arm, still in its uniform sleeve, in a ditch.
Always Marjorie.
‘It’s nothing to do with staying put,’ says Chloe. ‘I love my husband.’
‘Love!’ says Marjorie. ‘What’s that? At your age?’
She gets up, goes over to the Cona coffee machine, and helps herself and Chloe to coffee. The waiter is nowhere in sight. Chloe longs to leave, but Marjorie has no intention of giving up.
