by Weldon, Fay
Gwyneth believes she has only to speak the words and Mr Leacock will be hers; and forever procrastinates, and never quite speaks them. Thus, lonely women do live, making the best of what they cannot help: reading significance into casual words: seeing love in calculated lust: seeing lust in innocent words; hoping where there is no hope. And so they grow old in expectation and illusion, and perhaps it is preferable to growing old in the harsh glare of truth.
28
‘Of course I told Marjorie that father raped me,’ says Grace. ‘Marjorie would never be able to make up anything so interesting on her own account. They’re all like that in the media – no imagination at all. Poor father. He was very drunk and very angry.’
In what serves for a bedroom, Grace packs. That is, she empties drawers upon the floor, selects garments and stuffs them into squashy leather bags, seeming to have as much an affection for old torn knickers as she does for Yves St Laurent jumpers.
‘He’d taken off his belt to beat me – I think he once had a batman whose virility he admired very much, who used to say the way to keep women in order was to belt them. But all that happened to father was that his trousers fell down, and you know what those austerity underpants were like. I could see he had what I supposed – I was only fifteen – to be an erection. Usually his penis was a dim little thing snuggling in beneath his pot belly. Mother referred to it as daddy’s winkie. We had baths together, you know, to save the hot water. Sunday mornings. Marjorie went in with mother, I went in with father. It was unpatriotic to have more than six inches of water in the bath – even King George himself did not.
‘And here father was, pointing this great big swollen thing at me, like a gun. I told Marjorie he got me down on the bed and put it in, because that’s what she wanted to hear, and I might have known she’d pass the word along, but I don’t think he actually did. One would remember a thing like that, I suppose? Though in fact, in sexual matters, one remembers what one wants to forget. At the time I wanted it to be true. I told Patrick my father had raped me. I wanted him to take an interest.’
‘Did he?’ asks Chloe.
‘Yes,’ says Grace. ‘He laid me in the ditch, there and then, to take the taste from my mouth, he said. And then he said tell no-one, or I’ll go to prison, you’re under age, look what a risk I’m taking on your behalf. Forget it outside but remember it inside, he said. It’s good for you.’
‘Patrick and his therapeutic dick,’ says Chloe, sadly.
Occasionally, as Grace tosses about amongst her piles of clothing – as she used to toss about, as a child in piles of autumn leaves – she will lift a jersey or bra to her nose and sniff, and if she finds it offensive she will either throw it into the waste bin, if she considers it too far gone, or spray lavishly with cologne before returning it to its pile. Chloe is half admiring, half shocked.
‘It’s a relief to be able to talk about such things,’ says Grace. ‘All those years we had to keep quiet! Sebastian talks about everything all the time, every detail, as if nothing that happened was too terrible to mention. When we make love, which isn’t often, thank God, he keeps up a running commentary. I don’t like it at all.’
And indeed, Grace prefers the silent embraces of her youth, when there were no words for what she did, or what was done to her, or if there were, she didn’t know them.
In those other days of speechless intertwinings, she feels, a darker force came into play, linking her more closely to the mindless patterns of the universe. Now this procreative essence shrivels in the light of knowledge. Fellatio, cunnilingus, sodomy – is this what is happening? Is this better than the night before, or what the Jaggers do? Grace would really rather not know, but to Sebastian such knowledge is all in all. Presently it will be the same for her. She knows it.
‘I preferred it when fuck was a swear word,’ says Grace.
‘You ought to get this place cleared up,’ says Chloe, nervous of what Grace might say next.
What does Grace have to offer Sebastian, Chloe wonders, since it’s not her sexual cooperation? You could leaf through a whole month’s supply of women’s magazines and not find the answer. Certainly not his creature comforts, let alone a secure and supportive base from which to face the outer world. Apart from the builders’ droppings, the floor is littered with books, crumbs, bills, mouse-traps, wine corks, empty bottles and old camembert boxes. The toilet has recently overflowed and the floor has been only cursorily cleaned. Out on the balcony Grace has been building a curious part-shiny part-encrusted tower with the foil boxes in which Chinese take-away food has been delivered. So much for talent.
Grace If you don’t like the mess, don’t look. You’re a poor cowardly timorous thing, like your mama. You think if you don’t clean up, no-one will love you.
Chloe (Lying) It’s not that at all. It’s if you don’t clear up you get typhoid.
Grace (Happily) We have rats. That ought to look good in court. I feed them.
Chloe You must get in new builders. It’s impossible to live like this.
Grace How can I? I haven’t any money until I get damages from the last lot.
Chloe Grace, you must have some money. You’ve just sold the Acacia Road house.
Grace I’ve given it all to Sebastian. He has to make a feature film about a strike in the Warwickshire coal fields in 1933.
Chloe (Horrified) Grace!
How many times has she not spoken that word, in just those tones? Perhaps it is to hear it that Grace behaves as she does? Spoken by Chloe, a wail of concern.
Grace Sebastian says it’s Christie’s money anyway. It ought to be ploughed back as soon as possible into the society whence it was milked.
Chloe But that’s nonsense.
Grace Do you think so? In any case I’m certain to get it back. I have a percentage of the profits.
Chloe What profits? You’re crazy. If you want to invest in a film why didn’t you ask Oliver first?
Grace Because I don’t love Oliver. I love Sebastian. Anyway Oliver belongs to another world. He’s too old. What a bourgeois soul you have, Chloe. You’ve gone quite pale.
Chloe What about Stanhope’s school fees?
Grace Perhaps he’ll have to go to a comprehensive school, after all. That should please you. But it will be from necessity, not principle, don’t think otherwise.
Chloe God give me strength.
This is Oliver’s favourite phrase.
Grace Don’t get so agitated. Stephen said it was a perfectly good script. He told me I should put my money in it. He said the world was ripe, for protest films.
Chloe But Stephen is in advertising, not films.
Stephen is Grace’s brother. He is twenty-seven.
29
Spring, 1945. Hitler is in retreat. Esther Songford is fatter than ever, in spite of stringent rationing. Two ounces of butter a week, three of margarine, one egg and six ounces of meat. Bread and potatoes are on points, as are nearly all groceries. Only carrots and cabbage seem in infinite supply. Esther cooks both in the same water, to save fuel.
‘You lumber round like an old cow,’ says Edwin to Esther, and she cries. She would like to be young and lively and slim again, and not feel sick all the time. She would like to be like Helen, to please her husband. She doses herself with Syrup of Figs, in the hope that it will make her so. She has a vague belief that you become fat from eating hot food; and lets her dinner get cold upon her plate, to Grace’s outrage and irritation. Anything irritates Grace, these days.
Edwin explains about proteins and carbohydrates: but Esther refuses to understand. She is not stupid, but is as irrational about food as she is about her insides.
One Saturday evening when Marjorie is back for the weekend, she, Grace and Chloe sit playing Monopoly with Esther. Esther sits well back from the table to give her fat tummy room. She wears a thin green cotton smock over a skirt which will not meet around her waist, and is pinned with a nappy pin.
A ripple runs under the smock. Esther’s bulging stoma
ch, beneath the thin cotton, can be seen to bulge and heave. There’s something alive, inside.
‘Look,’ says Marjorie, her hand frozen in mid air, still holding the hotel she’s about to put down on Pall Mall. (Marjorie’s winning, as usual. Lucky in games, unlucky in love.) Everyone looks where she points.
‘There’s something in there moving,’ says Marjorie.
Mrs Songford lurches to her feet: she is pale with shock and realization.
‘I’m too old,’ she says. ‘I can’t be. I thought it was the Change.’
But it’s not, and she is, and Stephen is born in the cottage hospital some two months later.
The end of the war is a difficult time for everyone. The adrenalin level in the nation’s bloodstream falls abruptly – depression is bound to follow. It does. Fear of oneself replaces the fear of sudden death: waking nightmares turn into sleeping ones again. No excuses left. Children have to move over to make room for fathers they cannot remember: wives have beloved husbands to feed and not just talk about: women have to leave their jobs and return to the domestic dedication expected of all good women in peacetime. Hitler is not coming, and neither is God; there is to be neither punishment nor salvation. There is, instead, a flurry of sexual activity which will land the schools between 1950 and 1960 with what is known as ‘The Bulge’.
In the meantime, at home, there is a shortage of medical supplies – anaesthetics and blood for transfusions, not to mention doctors and nurses, are hard to come by. Midwifery, as always, comes low on the list of national priorities. Poor Esther, after a long labour unrelieved by anaesthetics, enjoined not to make a fuss by a severe spinster midwife, is delivered of a baby boy by sharp steel forceps. Esther haemorrhages after the baby has been put into the nursery, and everyone has gone off to tea, and dies unattended.
An accident, an illness, a death – and a family unit which has seemed secure and permanent can be seen to crumble, with a kind of gratitude, into nothingness. It seems that chaos and dissolution are the norm, and the good times just an accident between them. Days which seem hesitant and troubled as they are lived through, full of minor irritations and absurdities, can be seen in retrospect to be days of wine and roses. Monopoly! Flower shows! School reports! Blackberry puddings and arguments about onions!
They were good times at The Poplars, yes they were, and it was Esther who provided them, plodding dutifully through her days, though no-one thanked her at the time. Did she know she was rewarded? That for Marjorie, Grace and Chloe she provided a nourishment which was to see them through their bad times into good? Or did she see herself as her husband claimed to see her, a stumbling ineffectual creature, mentally chewing the cud of her days as once, at her father’s behest, she chewed each mouthful of food, over and over and over again?
Grace is seventeen when the baby is born, and her mother dies. She is supposed to be going to the Slade in the autumn, to study the graphic arts. But what’s to be done with this motherless baby, this squalling red-faced morsel with its bruised temples and its sticky eyes? Will Grace stay home and look after it?
No, Grace will not.
Edwin, distraught enough at Esther’s death, finding his days empty, his socks unwashed, his food uncooked, his evenings at the pub flavourless for lack of her disapproval, takes refuge in rage and madness. He will not speak to Grace: she is, he says, unnatural and unwomanly. He refuses to pay for her tuition at the Slade; but Esther has left her daughter two hundred pounds he never knew she had, and this too he cannot forget or forgive. He is quite mad, for a time. Relatives say he must engage a housekeeper to look after the house and the baby, and by inference himself, but he will not. He will only be cheated and taken advantage of; he knows it. His pink face grows pale and wan: his paunch shrivels, for a time he looks as Esther does – dead.
Weeds run riot over the flower-beds. See how nature plots against him? By the time he recovers his sanity he has sold The Poplars, bought himself a bungalow in Bournemouth, sent the baby off to be brought up by Esther’s elder brother’s wife – an amiable widow, by name Elaine, who wears a shirt, tweed suit and brogues, and lives in harmony with Olive, a lady companion with a definite black moustache.
Elaine and Olive breed dogs outside Horsham; and here, except when swept off his feet by bouncing and clumsy labradors, Stephen is reared in happiness and contentment.
He grows, in fact, to some twenty stone, which in a young man of twenty-seven and five feet ten is not inconsiderable. He has Esther’s pale pop eyes, much magnified by heavy spectacles, reddish hair and a cleft chin. He has an astute mind, and a commercial instinct. He works in advertising.
Grace used to be ashamed of Stephen. Stephen was, after all, associated with a traumatic time in her life, and could almost be said by his untimely birth to have caused many of her troubles. Stephen was fat, plain and not at all smart. Latterly, though, the gloss of advertising and the cheerful energy of the commercial world, rubbing off upon and somehow firming up his pallid skin, have made Stephen seem rather more attractive to Grace. She looks towards him with hope, beginning to see him as an asset, and not a liability.
Grace Of course, you realize that Stephen is Patrick’s son?
Shock affects Chloe with a slight buzzing in the ears, a distancing of sound, a difficulty in hearing.
Grace It gives one some hope for Stanhope, to think that he’s Stephen’s half-brother. Perhaps we should steer Stanhope towards advertising? Or would Oliver object?
Chloe I do not believe that Stephen is Patrick’s son. I cannot believe it. Your mother wasn’t like that. Women didn’t behave like that.
Grace All women are like that. All women behave like that. It’s been proved, at last. They’ve just done a blood-grouping survey in a Hampshire Town, and discovered that a minimum of one in four children cannot possibly be the blood child of the alleged father. A minimum!
Chloe All I’d deduce from that is an inefficient local maternity home which doles out the wrong babies. Patrick was a boy at the time. Esther was old enough to be his mother.
Grace So am I old enough to be Sebastian’s mother. Perhaps it runs in families. Stephen looks like Patrick, don’t you think?
Chloe Beneath so much fat, who could tell?
Grace And he has this extraordinary creativity. He’s always making or doing something, just like Patrick.
And indeed Patrick, as a young man, is possessed by a demon creativity. He must make something where nothing was before – a painting, a sing-song, a novel, a garden, an affair – forever bridging the gap between nothing and something.
Grace And he knows everything too, just like Patrick did.
In 1945, it is astonishing what Patrick knows, which the rest of Ulden doesn’t. He knows that the Bank of England financed Hitler, and that Churchill is an incompetent paranoiac: he knows that sex is not sin, and that gramophone records don’t have to be small and fast, but could be large and slow, or even put on to lengths of tape, if only vested interests would allow. He knows that one day men will get to the moon, and that after the war to be born British will not be to be especially blessed by God. He knows what is happening to the Jews in Germany. He knows what will make Marjorie, Grace and Chloe happy.
For reasons, then obscure, he prefers to keep Marjorie unhappy.
Waltzing with Marjorie once, at the D-Day dance, he points out to her some six or seven of the most good-looking young men on the floor.
‘Him and him and him,’ he says. ‘They’re all in treatment for VD.’
Grace Anyway, you know what Patrick was. Anything in skirts would do. And mother had very nice legs, and you know how she was always bending over the flower-beds. Shall I take the blue bikini or the black one-piece?
Grace’s body is still lean and smooth. She bronzes beautifully.
Chloe The one-piece.
But Grace has already sniffed it and tossed it into the waste bin.
Chloe Grace, you have to stop saying things that aren’t true. I would have thought your life was
difficult enough without you stirring things up.
Grace just looks at Chloe and smiles. And Chloe remembers Esther Songford, young and vulnerable, crying in the kitchen, and wonders. And Chloe considers Grace’s past and present, and wonders. Perhaps Edwin Songford, the father, the ultimate provider, did once in fact ultimately provide what was required, in fleshly terms, failing all other. And perhaps Grace’s lie – for lie she claims it was – is not the incest itself, but her horror of it.
Grace Sometimes you act like Mad Doll, Chloe. You won’t believe what you know to be true.
30
Mad Doll haunts Ulden through the war years. She comes up on the London train at weekends, and walks through the village, stopping passers-by, knocking at doors, always smiling, always wheedling.
‘Have you seen my boys, doll? Cyril and Ernest?’
She offers wild flowers to the women and kisses to the men, as if she thought she could bribe good news out of them.
‘Cyril’s jersey is green, dolly. I knitted it myself. Ernest’s is maroon and on the small side.’
When it grew dark she’d give up and go home, sitting in the train quite calm and collected, like anyone else.
Cyril and Ernest are buried in Ulden churchyard. They were drowned on their second day in the village, running back to home and London in the middle of the night, crossing the ice of the chalk pit in the dark. Their school had been evacuated to Ulden, without warning to the parents; and no information either, once they’d gone, in case German spies found out. Mad Doll, they say, has slept with the school-keeper to find out where her children have gone, and even then he couldn’t be precise. Essex, was all he’d say, and Essex is a large place.
Mad Doll arrives in Ulden the day after her children are buried. The vicar breaks the news of their deaths to her, but she seems unable to take it in. He leads her by the hand to the new grave, but she looks at it blankly and then says ‘I’ll give you a kiss if you tell me where they are. More than a kiss, if you insist.’
