by Weldon, Fay
Today Patrick’s canvases fetch from £750 (for the larger works) to £2,000 (for the tiniest). He paints women making love, giving birth, dying, dead, emerging dimly from an overwhelming wealth of domestic detail.
Chloe shows Patrick Bates her father’s paintings, those near miniatures in 1947. He comes to the room behind the Rose and Crown to inspect them, one night at ten-thirty, while Gwyneth is still washing-up glasses. Chloe lies on her front on the floor, searching beneath her mother’s bed, amongst the cases and crates, for the canvas roll. She finds them right at the back, pushed against the wall. By then she is almost completely under the bed, except for her seventeen-year-old legs.
The floor is so clean that Chloe’s check dress is not even made dusty. Had Gwyneth been of a more sluttish disposition, Chloe might have given up the search earlier, and Patrick never seen her father’s paintings, or Chloe’s smooth stretched legs, for that matter.
Thus our destinies are made, for good or ill. Inigo, Imogen. Kevin, Kestrel, Stanhope: linking back to brave David Evans, sitting exhausted in a hospital bed, waiting for the taste of blood in his mouth, covering his tiny canvases with scrupulous care – obsession mingling with optimism. Courage is not in vain; the painful wresting of beauty out of ugliness is not wasted. Believe it to be forgotten, worthless, buried deep and rotting under clods of earth, yet it creeps out somehow, raises its storms of life and energy.
Patrick stares at David Evans’ paintings and seems stunned.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Very interesting.’
He looks again.
‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘There’s one way not to die.’
Chloe is flushed from crawling about on the floor.
‘Would you like me to make you pregnant?’ Patrick inquires, and it seems to Chloe that this is exactly what she wants. Patrick makes love to her there and then, upon her mother’s bed, to Chloe’s infinite amazement and gratification. It seems to her not so much a pleasurable experience as an overwhelming one – as much another world to enter into, as the one of sleep, when she has been awake, or waking, when she has been asleep. She suspects it of being a dangerous world, full of deadly pit-traps, but clearly the one the élite inhabit.
Patrick leaves within the half-hour, to get back to camp.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says. ‘Forget all about it outside. Remember it inside. It’s very good for you.’
The next morning, waking, she has difficulty in believing the event actually occurred. She stares at the faint well-sponged stain on her mother’s coverlet, and wonders if perhaps she did spill her tea, as she told Gwyneth. Patrick, thereafter, ignores her, and suffering, she recognizes reality again.
She isn’t pregnant, not this time. She doesn’t care for that: it makes Patrick too unlike the Deity.
25
‘No,’ says Chloe, ‘I don’t know what today is.’
Today Françoise has been in the Rudore household for just nine months. For three months she has had carnal acquaintance with her employer. Chloe has had none for nearly a year. Is this hardship? Chloe does not know.
When Chloe sleeps in her husband’s bed, there is no end to her expectations – not just that the empty spaces in her body should be nightly filled and rewarded, but all her inner space as well, by day.
Look after me, nurture me, love me, care for me, she cries to him with every waking and with every sleeping breath. Be perfect. Not perfect as you see it, but as I want perfection. Be perfect not just for me, but for our children too. All our children. Don’t work, don’t drink, don’t be bad-tempered; these things deflect you from your task. Your task is me. Fill me, fill my empty spaces. Complete me.
Although, in her heart, Chloe knows she never can be filled. Some wounds have gone too deep, protective membranes have been torn and can’t be mended. Love and concern will always trickle out of her, in the end, and leave her empty again, no matter how he fills, and fills.
But sleeping in his bed, she cannot quench her expectations.
Out of his bed, she can be serene. Badly treated, but at least free of expectation. Walking wounded, trudging away from the battle zone, not needing the pretence of being whole. What a relief! So long as the children notice nothing.
Of course they notice. Inigo and Imogen, Kestrel and Kevin. Stanhope too.
‘Very well,’ says Chloe, ‘tell me what today is.’ The ground beneath shakes as a juggernaut passes, off on its journey to the M4 and the West.
What a dim domestic heroine she is in danger of becoming, like her mother, like Mrs Songford, who at least died in disgrace. Like a million million women, shuffling and shameful to the end.
‘Today eighteen years ago,’ says Marjorie, ‘I went to the hospital to collect Ben and I found him dead in a drawer. Today a week ago I went to the doctor, and he said I ought to have a hysterectomy, it was ridiculous the way I bled, and I don’t know what to do. Don’t you please tell me, either, Chloe, I don’t trust your judgement any more. Not since Françoise. You don’t know how that’s upset me. I had hoped that you at least could be happy.’
What can Chloe say? She wants to cry, for everyone.
26
Today Grace lives with Sebastian, who is fifteen years younger than she is. Or rather Sebastian lives with Grace. Grace may have the income, but Sebastian has the talent, the charm, and the future. He picks and chooses whom he lives with. Grace, these days, tends to take what comes along. Sebastian is a film director, or would be if he could raise the money to make a film. He was taught film-making at his public school, and took a degree in visual communication at college.
Today Grace lives in a half-finished flat, on the top floor of a large terrace house in Holland Park. She has been living there for six months, the last three of them with Sebastian. Here Chloe goes to visit her.
Builders have been knocking three rooms into one, but have gone away, it seems, in the middle of the task. There are piles of plaster rubble and heaps of sodden wallpaper, inside and outside the flat, and strips of wallpaper are still stretched half-pasted on a trestle table. Tins of paint stand open and congealing. Chloe automatically replaces the lids.
Grace crouches on the floor in front of the fan heater, drying her thick red hair. She has cleared a living space by the window, spread it with rugs and cushions, set up the hi-fi, plugged in an electric kettle and a small wall refrigerator, and within these limits has set up her home.
‘Don’t clear up the mess,’ says Grace. ‘I may have to sue. Everything has to look as dreadful as possible.’
Over the years Grace has developed quite a taste for litigation. She who once stood in court and wept, and screamed, now has a liking for the experience. And thus the conversation goes, between her and her friend Chloe:
Grace And how was Marjorie’s moustache? Or does she shave, these days?
Chloe She has better things to think about.
Grace What? The BBC? And how’s Patrick? Does she say?
Chloe Much the same, mad and mean.
Grace Why doesn’t she move in with him? What a waste of rent and rates.
Chloe He hasn’t asked her to.
Grace She has this dreadful habit of deferring to the male. She’s as bad as you, Chloe. Don’t you just love this flat?
Chloe It’s hard to say.
Grace I hate it. It’s been a nightmare.
Chloe You didn’t have to move. You could have kept the house in St John’s Wood.
Grace No I couldn’t. I sold it. I had to have the money. I couldn’t keep the buyer out for ever. His wife kept having babies and he kept complaining and in the end he had me evicted, well, more or less. The squatter people were very unhelpful.
Chloe That house was all you had. When you’ve got rid of the money, Grace, what will you do?
Grace Die. I hate it round here, don’t you? It’s a real middle-class ghetto. Full of short-sighted women with frizzy hair dressed all in leather and carrying teddy bears. All the real people have been driven out. You can’t thin
k how filthy this flat was when I moved in. They had five children and the father was in prison and the mother had TB and the floorboards were sodden with piss. I tried painting them with lino paint but they still smelt so I got some builders in to replace the floors. It was when the boards were up that Sebastian moved in and said we might as well have the whole place done properly, so they started knocking down the partition walls, and then the Council turned up and said they weren’t partition walls at all, but structural, and the whole thing was illegal anyway and what about Planning Permission, and then of course the builders got disheartened and left. I’d paid them in advance – that was Sebastian’s idea, he said it was customary, to show you trusted them. And then Sebastian got this architect friend of his to do some drawings, and he met some more builders in a pub – that’s their mess over there, they were film technicians starting a new career, well, you know what the film industry’s like – and then the neighbours got up a petition to stop us spoiling the sky-line, and in the meanwhile the builders had been offered a film after all, and couldn’t refuse – they were making it in Belfast and the original crew had walked out – well, you know how it all is. I don’t have to tell you. Property is all very boring.
Chloe What happened to the mother with TB?
Grace Is that the only thing you care about?
Chloe Yes.
Grace I don’t know. I never asked. She was moved to the outskirts by some kind of agency, I believe. I paid her a thousand to get out. It was a fortune for someone like her.
Chloe And which is Stanhope’s room?
Grace You’ll have to ask the architect. He has a plan for some kind of ceiling suspension for guests. I don’t trust him, really. He’s all quick imaginative sketches and lots of talk and never any measurements.
Chloe Then why employ him?
Grace He’s Sebastian’s friend.
Chloe It’s your money.
Grace No it’s not, it’s Christie’s. He’s lying there in his grave – or at any rate his urn – cheering at the way I’ve mismanaged things. I’ve never earned a penny in my life, not in the pay packet sense. I wouldn’t know how to start. I’d quite like to be an opera singer, mind you.
Chloe Like your mother?
Grace No, not like my mother. I’d forgotten about her. I couldn’t bear to do anything which ran in the family. Is Stanhope musical?
Chloe He never mentions it, only football. He’s your son, not mine. They send you the school reports; you could always look it up, I suppose, under Extra Activities.
Grace I never read school reports. They should be abolished. They’re an invasion of a child’s privacy. What a child needs from a school is anonymity.
Chloe In that case, perhaps Stanhope should go to a comprehensive school. It’s what he wants to do.
Grace You always give in to the children, Chloe. How can a boy Stanhope’s age know what’s best for him? He’s far happier at a boarding school. They’ve got good teachers and wonderful equipment and splendid playing fields, and he must have lots of friends by now.
Chloe He doesn’t make friends easily.
Grace Then think how miserable he’d be at a comprehensive school.
Chloe You did tell him he only had to board ʼtil you had somewhere settled to live.
Grace Settled? Do you call this settled? And I don’t trust that architect. I don’t think Stanhope would be happy in a ceiling suspension, do you? No, he’ll have to stay where he is. And I’m certainly not having him at a comprehensive; why does he think he wants to go?
Chloe He wants to play soccer, not rugby.
Grace There you are, it’s ridiculous. Besides, with a stupid name like Stanhope he’d only get laughed at, down there amongst the yobs.
Grace changes her social attitudes along with her boyfriends, as a stick insect changes colour according to the bush it lands on. But the nervous craving for privilege keeps rearing its head. Though she is, at the moment, prepared to blow up Eton, or at any rate light the fuse for the dynamite Sebastian has laid, she will not have her son at a comprehensive school.
Chloe It was you who named him, Grace. You insisted on Stanhope, in spite of everyone’s advice.
Grace The whole episode of Stanhope was ridiculous, I quite agree. I should have had an abortion. I should never have listened to you, Chloe. Stanhope is your responsibility. Do you like my dress?
Chloe No.
Grace wears a navy-blue silk dress, made circa 1946; it has an uneven hem and frayed seams. It clings rather sadly to Grace’s small bosom, seeming to miss a more robust original owner.
Grace No? I do. I bought it down the Portobello. Marjorie’s mother had one like this. Do you think it’s the same one? I always wanted to be like Helen.
Chloe You’ve succeeded.
She does not mean it kindly.
27
January 1945. Helen, back from New York, turns up unexpectedly at The Poplars. It is eight in the morning and there is snow on the ground. She presses a ten shilling note into Marjorie’s trembling hand, and presents Esther Songford with a tin of salmon. Esther has put on a good deal of weight – her ankles are puffy and she is short of breath – but she manages to gasp her thanks.
‘Is Esther all right?’ asks Helen, all solicitude, drawing Edwin to one side. ‘She looks dreadful!’ Helen has left the engine of her Baby Austin running. She can’t stay more than a minute. Her passenger, grey-faced and desperate, stands in the drive, stamping his feet to keep warm, refusing to enter. He is, Helen says, a Labour politician.
‘Esther’s just fat,’ says Edwin. ‘Too many potatoes. She’s let herself go.’
‘We must none of us let ourselves go,’ says Helen. ‘We must get ready to win the peace, as we are winning the war.’
Helen is elegant even at eight in the morning. She wears a thin spotted navy dress with padded shoulders and a pleated skirt, and a fur coat, and her stockings are made of nylon – the first pair even seen in Ulden. She has the new wedgie shoes. Her hair is piled up over her forehead and falls smoothly away behind until it reaches the nape of her neck, whence it rises again in a semi-circular half-curl, like a seawave on the verge of breaking. Such an effect is hard to come by: but in these times hair must look as unlike hair as possible, as must complexions. Orangy pancake make-up hides every blemish; scarlet lipstick transforms the lips into a cupid’s bow God never intended.
Helen looks lovely, and inhuman. Esther clutches her old dressing-gown round her, clasps the tin of salmon and sinks into a chair, taking the weight off her poor aching legs. She feels sick all the time.
‘I’ve only a minute, my dears,’ says Helen, as they cluster round her, like bees around the honey. ‘Marjorie, you must move back to London this weekend.’
‘But you can’t, the V-bombs—’ says Esther Songford, from her chair. Helen ignores her.
‘But I can’t leave now. What about my Higher Certificate—’ says Marjorie, ‘and my University Entrance—’ Edwin scowls at her.
‘You love your father more than school, surely,’ says Helen. ‘We have reason to believe he will soon be repatriated, on humanitarian grounds. He’ll want his family about him after all he’s been through. I must dash now. John’s on his way to a very important meeting. I promised to drive him; so much more cosy than the train, but I’m afraid if I stop the engine we never seem to get it started again. I tell him it doesn’t matter if he’s late, he’s so important they’ll be perfectly happy to wait all day for him, but I’m afraid he’s dreadfully agitated.’
And off she goes.
When Chloe tells Gwyneth that Marjorie’s going back to London, tears come into Gwyneth’s eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ asks Chloe, surprised. ‘She’s going home, isn’t she?’
‘This war,’ says Gwyneth. ‘What it’s done to us all!’ She has an unsightly rash on her hands. The doctor says it’s due to washing-up water and vitamin deficiency, but what can she do about either?
‘After the war,’ asks Chl
oe, ‘what about us? Will we go back to London?’
But Gwyneth doesn’t want to go.
‘You must stay here and finish your schooling,’ she says.
Gwyneth is proud of Chloe; her neat, pretty, clever daughter is her one achievement. She thrills with pleasure at each success in school; she panics at the slightest headache. She is selfless in her concern for her daughter’s welfare, expecting nothing in return, forever soothing, patting, encouraging, moulding, preaching patience and endurance.
So long, that is, as Chloe’s interests and that of the Leacocks do not conflict. If this happens, the Leacocks win. Gwyneth loves Mr Leacock. Why else would she allow Chloe to get up at six on those winter mornings, risking health and energy, to do the guests’ shoes, and lay up breakfast, and waylay the milkman to get extra milk – and even, as she grows older and cleverer, to stay up late and make up the accounts after the Rose and Crown is closed? All for nothing, unless you count Mr Leacock’s smile.
‘What an honour,’ Gwyneth says. And believes it, and so does Chloe.
Gwyneth has nowhere to go. She is over forty now and has no savings. Her life at the Rose and Crown has settled into a tolerable pattern of exploitation and excitement mixed. She believes that Mr Leacock loves her. And indeed, on the rare occasions when he can contrive to be alone with Gwyneth, he certainly kisses her and tells her so. They were meant for each other, he says, but their love can never be, can never go beyond kisses. Gwyneth must not, no, she must not, leave his employment because he will be miserable if she does. And no, she must not ask for more money or a shorter working week or his wife will suspect him.
And Gwyneth, such is her guilt and such the excitement engendered by these secret meetings, is content to believe him. The years pass quickly: she is forever looking forward, forever watching for a sideways look, forever half fearing, half hoping that Mrs Leacock will see and suspect. And the more guilty Gwyneth feels about the husband, the more fond she becomes of the wife, that bright little bird-woman, pitying her for the drabness of a life which contains only an open and legal love.
