by Weldon, Fay
No wonder he suffers from blood-pressure.
She’s a pretty girl, still only in her mid-twenties, though soon she develops a crabbed and aged look. Her husband is on active service, somewhere secret, and he is never to come back. He is posted missing, presumed dead. The manner of his death is kept secret too. She’s become so used to secrets, poor soul, she’s simply ceased to trust information.
31
Sebastian comes bounding up the stairs, lean, lively, and desperate, as if the hounds of old age would be yapping at his heels if he went more slowly. He seems pleased to see Chloe, to Grace’s surprise. He clasps Chloe’s stiff, self-conscious body to his thin, denim shirt, asks how she is, even asks after Marjorie.
‘Having a hysterectomy,’ says Chloe.
‘My God, in the hysterectomy belt already!’ says Sebastian.
Sebastian wears a wide belt with a brass buckle, in the form of a snake swallowing an eagle. How he mocks and masters the world! How he suffers and shrinks at the prospect of boredom and solitude. How untouched he is by the world’s miseries.
All Sebastian owes the world, Sebastian believes, is his own existence, and the pleasure he takes in it.
Sebastian’s buttocks are clearly defined in faded jeans. Chloe surprises herself with a sudden surge of sexual desire, which goes straight from eyes to womb, bypassing her brain. Is this, she wonders, what Esther Songford saw and felt, lifting her eyes from the geraniums to those of Patrick Bates?
Forget it outside, remember it inside. It will do you good.
‘Marjorie’s insides were always a source of trouble to her,’ says Grace, ushering Chloe out rather hastily. ‘She’d be better off without them.’
Well, thinks Chloe, forgiving, if your mother died in childbirth, giving birth to the half-brother of one of your own children, you too might find yourself viewing female insides as more trouble than they’re worth.
‘Grace,’ says Chloe, lingering and anxious, ‘your mother didn’t know about you and Patrick, did she?’
‘No,’ says Grace. ‘But I think she knew about father and me. That must have helped her die happy. She was always putting me in his way, you must have noticed, drawing attention to my tits or my arse, under guise of clothing coupons.’
‘You imagine it.’ Chloe is nervous.
‘She didn’t like me and she didn’t like him, and it killed two birds with one stone. Like you and your Françoise.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Pushing her under your husband’s nose. I watched you do it, and I think you deserve what happened.’
She is all malevolence, suddenly, eyes aglitter. Chloe trembles, as she does when her reasonable world turns upside down.
‘What harm have I done you?’ she asks. ‘Why are you like this?’
‘You just existed,’ says Grace. ‘You and Marjorie. Great big cuckoos in my nest. It was you who killed my mother. You wore her out.’
And Grace goes inside and slams the door and poor Chloe, much upset, goes back home to Egden, to cope with Françoise and weed the geranium beds, before the light fades.
32
Marjorie, Grace and me.
We have our arcane secrets, our superstitions, our beliefs, fact and fantasy mixed. Our sexual fears, both rational and irrational. Our own experiences which we share with each other. They are altogether different from what the novels and text books told us they would be.
We got our certificates, our diplomas, our degrees. We had miscarriages, abortions and babies. Marjorie and I caught the clap. We still cannot name our secret parts. We know them blindly, by feel, and not by sight or name. They rule us.
Grace says women ovulate from sheer astonishment. That’s why innocent girls get pregnant and experienced ones don’t. Grace says she has a corroded cervix: she believes she has a soft and bubbly cyst somewhere inside which no doctor can discover: she says she’s only twice had an orgasm in her life other than by masturbation, which she didn’t discover until long after she’d left Christie, and even then didn’t know that what she did had a name or that anyone else ever did it. Grace feels her bosom daily for cancer and daily discovers a good many different lumps. Grace does not trust the doctors who examine her insides. She suspects they take pleasure from the process. Well, she does.
Grace has had cheap back-street abortions and National Health abortions and an expensive post-Abortion Act abortion. She loves anaesthetics and feels only relief when the baby’s gone and she’s no longer nauseous. Grace tried a contraceptive coil but bled too profusely to keep it in. One woman in three does, says Grace. The pill made her sick. Dutch caps disgust her. These days Grace takes no contraceptive precautions at all. It is her Act of Oneness with the universe, or so she says. She relies on her age, her inverted womb and her imagined fibroids to protect her from pregnancy.
Grace enjoys getting pregnant, but not being pregnant.
Marjorie believes her reproductive energies were drained by her first baby, which she failed to carry to maturity.
Marjorie believes she is infertile, and will never know, because she takes oestrogen pills to regulate her monthly bleeding – not that it does.
Marjorie believes the age of the menarche to be dependent on the weight of the girl. Menstruation starts at ninety-four pounds. She, later to menstruate than any of her friends, need never have worried.
Marjorie believes it is just as well she is infertile – since any baby she had would be born monstrous. A disagreeable young nurse implied as much at the VD clinic she had the misfortune to attend, and Marjorie chooses to believe her.
Marjorie thinks if she had Patrick’s baby it would perhaps be all right, but Patrick, alas, only uses her as a washer-woman.
Marjorie consults gynaecologists, goes to Health Farms, looks to authorities to tell her about the state of her insides, which she sees as a bloody, indeterminate mass and which behave accordingly.
Marjorie gives post-production parties at her flat and would sleep with anyone who cared to remain behind, except her insides will not allow, or very seldom. She bleeds too much.
I, Chloe, believe you shouldn’t get your feet wet when you have a period, that pre-menstrual tension is the result of fluid retention in the brain, that sex is for the begetting of children. That some children are meant – and that the most unlikely people will come together to produce a child, and having done so will part again, astonished at what they’ve done: that some of the most robust and kindly couples can’t help producing thin, weedy and miserable children and there’s no fairness in any of it. That children do not change their essential natures between the day they’re born and the day they leave home, and that there’s precious little you can do to help or hinder on the way.
I, Chloe, believe that if you do not consider your reproductive organs they will function properly, and that the harsh light of inquiry is damaging to their well-being.
Feel your breasts today and have cancer tomorrow. A cervical smear now means the womb out soon. Experience shows it to be true, if not statistics.
I, Chloe, feel my function to be maternal and not erotic. I cannot concede that it’s possible to be both, though reason tells me it is: and that is why I do not mind Françoise sharing Oliver’s bed. It allows me my dignity.
Besides, a mother must be watchful. It is one of the laws of nature that one cannot be watchful and orgasmic at the same time.
33
Greenfly cover the honeysuckle like a surging foam. Chloe notices it on her return from London. The flies reproduce themselves like broomsticks in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. New small greenfly simply crawl out of the backside of older larger greenfly. Oliver told Chloe so, once, in wonder.
After spraying the honeysuckle with the non-toxic spray that Oliver likes her to use, and watching a diminution of perhaps ten per cent in the level of the living foam. Chloe goes into the kitchen to face her family.
Françoise is at the Aga cooker, preparing the boeuf-en-daube. There is no machinery in the kitchen
apart from the refrigerator, which is essential to the chilling of Oliver’s champagne. Oliver dislikes the noise of domestic machinery: it jars his nerves. It is a symbol of the bourgeois content he dreads. He feels it to be more moral, with one half of the world starving and the other made wretched by the cult of conspicuous consumption, to have the dishes and clothes washed by hand; and the floors brushed on hands and knees; and closer to nature to have his food cooked over wood and coal, and not by electricity.
There are open grates in every room. This is in defiance of the Clean Air Act, it is true, but it is clear to Oliver that industry pollutes the air and not the private domestic fire. And as for cars (Oliver has two, a Peugeot estate and a Mustang) they contribute only six per cent to total air pollution and the attack against the private car, as is well known, is diversionary tactics backed by big business interests.
Chloe’s hands, for years, have been sodden with washing water, ingrained with dust and soot, splintered by the wooden floors. She is no longer interested in arguing with Oliver. He is better at arguing than she is. And why argue? Everything Oliver says about the outside world is patently true. She knows for herself that the Aga cooks better than would an electric stove: that hands break down less frequently than dishwashers or clothes washers; that deep-freezers spoil the flavour of food and denature it, that vacuum cleaners damage the valuable rugs; that it is immoral to employ other women to do one’s own dirty work; that central heating is enervating; that fitted carpets are a sign of growing old; that non-toxic greenfly spray does not kill butterflies.
Now it is Françoise’s turn to live by Oliver’s principle. In her parents’ house at Rheims are many modern conveniences, even an electric carving knife – for the thin and economical slicing of excellent meat – and a mechanical vegetable chopper. Françoise has come to despise such gadgetry.
When Chloe returns, Françoise’s face is wet with onion tears. Chloe is glad to see it. A whole layer of Gallic competence, she feels, is being peeled away. Beneath it lurks the universal woman, servile to the unreasonable will of the male.
Oliver believes himself to be supremely reasonable.
Oliver writes film scripts for major American film companies. His enemies (who are many) say they are slick. His friends (who are few) say they are competent. The scripts bring in a good deal of money. All Oliver wants to do is write novels. He would trade good money for good reviews any day.
Oliver is a scholarship boy at Bristol University when Chloe first meets him. He has emerged phoenix-like from the rubble of the bombed East End to read English literature. Oliver’s parents are of Russian-Jewish descent. Oliver’s mother has recently died of cancer, and Oliver’s father is suing, out of public funds, a shop which sold his wife a fur coat the week before she died, and under which she died, and which the shop now declines to accept back in return for a cash refund.
‘They could tell she was dying,’ says Oliver’s father Danny, six times a night for six weeks. Oliver counted. ‘What sort of business sells a fur coat to a dying woman? You only had to look at her to tell she was dying.’
Oliver hates his father, hates his sisters, hates the East End, hates the governments which have rained bombs upon his head, killed his friends, and destroyed by blast the garden he has so lovingly created in the back-yard, between the dog kennel and the clothes-line. He has renounced them all, along with chicken soup, Yom Kippur and shaven Jewish brides.
One drunken night Oliver goes to a student’s party. Picture the scene.
The student’s smoky room (in these days anyone who can afford to smoke does so, and very few have heard of lung cancer, let alone made a connection between that illness and cigarettes, though no doubt as many die from it); the travel posters (Cyprus, mostly) around the walls; the guttering candles (and the wax melts in untidy stalactic clumps, not blindly and neatly, as now); Chianti in straw bottles; rows of smiling jolly blackened teeth; men in their early twenties, National Service completed, or even – oh romance! – Active Service, wearing baggy grey trousers, white shirts, no ties – or, daring! – sweaters in muted colours, and cropped hair; the girls straight from school, in neat blouses, and pleated skirts, their hair feather-cut short, or permed into icy waves, their make-up thick and matte, concentrating – according to temperament – upon losing their virginity, or keeping it, or somehow, best of all, magically, doing both.
Into this party, just after midnight, at the stage before conversation fades away and couples fall into horizontal innocent embraces, comes Oliver.
Oliver does not look English. Oliver is too dark, too hairy, too discontented – and, shall one say, too Jewish. Not that anyone here is anti-semitic, on the contrary, just the feeling goes, that Oliver seems troublesome to himself and other people. He argues with professors, insults those who try to help him, finds fault with the syllabus and the examination system – but that’s what universities are for, surely – complains about the smallness of his grant, instead of being grateful for it like anyone else, and demands extra blankets and soft pillows for his bed – the comfort of which, after all, is underwritten by the long-suffering rate-payer.
Whatever, of course, the rates may be. Only a few have any idea, knowing or caring little, as they do, how their society is organized. Oliver knows. His father wailed and his mother choked every six months when the buff envelope arrived from the Town Hall. Town Hall? What’s that?
Oliver drinks the dregs of such Chianti bottles as he can find. He does not like these people. He has come to the party only because he cannot sleep. He feels himself to be superior to the other guests by virtue of his tormented past and his lack of insularity. Yet they insist, he knows it, on feeling superior to him, patronizing him, allowing him in their midst as a kind of mascot, as if their complacency was to their credit, as his torments a joke.
And the girls! How he hates them, with their rounded vowels, their peeking bosoms, their daddies and mummies, their Aryan niceness. A proportion will even undermine him by obliging in bed, not wishing to be abused for purity or meanness – yet still, although on top of them he must plainly be victorious, they remain superior, kindly and patronizing. It is he who cries out in his spasm: the most they do is moan agreeably and tell him they love him, which he knows to be untrue. He can make them smart, he can make them cry; yet twist their soft spiritual arms as he may, he cannot make them angry, or nasty.
They are too nice. They are not human. Human beings rant and roister, fuck and feed, love and smother, shake their fists at the universe in thunder storms and defy a creator who is sure to get them with the next lightning bolt. These little English girls, with their soft, uncomplaining voices, and their docile hearts, whose worst crime has been a foul on the hockey pitch, are quite alien to him. He feels at liberty to behave with them as he pleases, and if in so doing he gets the better of the blond, smiling men, with their cool, intelligent, experienced ex-service eyes, so much the better.
Oliver’s feet kept him out of the forces.
34
Dinner, it seems, is going to be late. If Françoise is still chopping onions then the boeuf-en-daube is far from ready. She wipes her eyes and turns them reproachfully towards Chloe. In the evenings, at the best of times, Françoise’s face tends to lose its daytime alertness, and to collapse into disorder, as if the spirit behind it had given up. Tonight she is grey with fatigue, and the corner of her eye is twitching.
Good, thinks Chloe. Good, good. And then, what nastiness is this? See what Marjorie and Grace have done to me!
Chloe Is anything the matter?
Françoise No.
Chloe Did you have a good day?
Françoise Yes.
Chloe Were the children helpful?
Françoise Yes.
Chloe You seem a little tired. Would you like me to take over?
Françoise It is not necessary. It is all completed now.
Chloe Isn’t it going to be rather late?
Françoise It will be ready to eat at twelve fifteen.
So Oliver, too, has had a bad day. It is not unusual for him, having abandoned one day as disagreeable, to postpone dinner until the next.
Chloe Then what about the children?
Françoise Oliver (How she pronounces the name, with what sensuous Gallic charm – Oli-vaire!) Oliver says the children are to have fish fingers. He says, in any case, it is a pity to waste good food on small fry.
Chloe I’m afraid it will make you rather late, Françoise. I’ll stay up and clear away, if you like.
Françoise No. That is not necessary. It is what I am paid to do, and the literary spirit is a flame which must be fanned and not quenched. I am honoured to be able to serve.
There is a note of desperation in her voice.
Chloe You must get some sleep.
Françoise Oliver says that science tells us that the female needs less sleep than the male.
Chloe I expect science does.
Françoise May I confide in you, Mrs Rudore?
Chloe Of course.
What now?
Françoise Mr Rudore wishes me to sit English O-level examinations, and the classes are so distant and the buses are so far and few between I am quite distrait.
Chloe But your English is so good, Françoise. Really most colloquial.
Françoise Mr Rudore wants it to be better still, so that when he reads me his writing I can criticize in an informed fashion.
Chloe (Presently) Does he often read his work to you, Françoise? I had no idea!
Nor has she. Chloe is hurt and upset. A pain catches her under her ribs. Perhaps Marjorie and Grace are right. Perhaps she is surrounded by enemies – perhaps bed is the thin edge of Françoise’s wedge.
Françoise Today was the first occasion I have been so privileged. He called for you, but you were not there, Mrs Rudore. You were in London, visiting your friends. The creative flame is so easily dimmed, that when he asked me to take your place in the easy chair I could not, in all correctness, refuse. He also asked me for my honest opinion, but when I gave it, he said I must have English lessons.
