by Weldon, Fay
Oliver What makes you think you’re so superior?
Chloe is speechless.
Oliver Too good to talk to me, you see.
How black his eyes are: how furious his mouth. He has rolled up his shirt-sleeves. His arms are hairy and sinewy. He moves up and sits next to her on the cushion. She edges over, but still their bodies touch. He smiles.
Oliver Why are you girls so mean with yourselves?
Chloe has the habit of instant guilt. If anyone says ‘it’s raining’, Chloe replies ‘I’m sorry’.
Chloe (Now) I’m sorry.
Oliver It’s not your fault. It’s the way you were brought up. What pretty hands you have. They haven’t done much washing-up, I don’t suppose. My mother died from taking in washing. She had cancer of the liver. Bleach fumes are carcinogenic, you know.
Chloe, horrified, doesn’t know. Oliver moves closer. They are the only pair upright in the room. Someone has blown out all but two candles. His eyes gleam in the darkness. She loses all impulse to move away.
Oliver Mind you, she was only a member of the working classes. You know, those comic characters you meet in novels. One thing’s for certain, this lot on the floor will never overthrow the established order of things. Too busy worrying about their sex lives. Will she, won’t she, can he, can’t he, and if she won’t he can, and she will he can’t. Who’s going to bother with Marx when they’re still stuck at Havelock Ellis. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Chloe No.
Oliver I’d better stop talking then. Tell me about yourself.
Chloe There’s nothing to tell.
He believes her.
Oliver What cold hands you have. And you’re so stiff. Why don’t you relax? Shall I take you home?
Mesmerized, Chloe lets him take her back to his attic flat. He makes tea and serves it in tin mugs. It is too late for her to get back into the hostel – she has a late pass but it expires at 1 a.m., when the doors are locked shut, but Chloe does not care, nor wish to burden him with her predicament. She will have to climb back in over the wall, like anyone else.
Oliver tells her about his mother’s death, his father’s villainy, his lost garden, his two school friends, killed by blast. He curses the government, the war, his race, his religion – he wants nothing of any of it. He cries! Chloe has never seen a man cry before. She didn’t know they did. Tears come into her own eyes.
‘I wish I could cry for you,’ she says, and means it. She throws away her happiness in handfuls, this girl.
Oliver is not in the habit of crying. He feels both ashamed and gratified at so doing. What is she doing to him, this quiet, unsmiling girl? Entering into his grief, accepting it – not attempting to deny it, as do most he meets. In these days he is the last person to believe – as he will later – that the past should remain dead and buried. But then later he has Chloe to bear the burden for him. After, all, he earns the money. The least Chloe can do is cope with his temperament.
But now he trembles as he undresses her and leads her to the bed. She needs no arguments, it seems, or promises. He does not want to make her angry, he does not want to hurt her. He wants to keep her.
Oliver Rudore and Chloe Evans. Love at first sight!
For Chloe does not doubt she loves him. She could spend the rest of her life in his bed, so much does it hurt when she’s out of it. Chloe, always so fearful of projecting a future for herself lest some inexorable force, roused from slumber by her daring, picks her up and sets her down again amongst the pots and pans of the Rose and Crown, can now raise her eyes from her text books, and see a vision of a future self, aligned to Oliver Rudore.
Chloe becomes very thin very quickly. She misses meals at the hostel because she is busy cooking Oliver’s, concocting marvels on his gas ring. She is short of sleep, since she seldom gets over the hostel wall and into bed before four in the morning, and Sociology tutorials start at nine. (Oliver has no classes before eleven.) In the evenings, when they are not making love, she learns typing from a Teach-Yourself book, the better to type Oliver’s essays.
Chloe writes to her mother, not mentioning Oliver at all, but asking whether Gwyneth can provide her with a typewriter. She, who never makes demands! Gwyneth instantly and dutifully supplies one; giving up her Thursday afternoons for three whole months to do so. Mrs Leacock kindly remarking that yes, the Rose and Crown could do with a new machine, and so perhaps Gwyneth would care to buy the old one from her, at a very reasonable price, considering the scarcity of metal, including thirty-year-old Olympias.
As for Oliver, he becomes quite genial. He even acquires some friends, lured partly by the change in him and partly by Chloe’s cooking. It is pleasant to see the pair of them together, holding hands whenever they can, thighs touching under the table, not so much lascivious as companionable, and replete.
Oliver’s sisters come to visit him, on leave from the telephone exchange. They do everything together: the two-headed, four-breasted monster of his childhood. Look at them now, swaying together into his room, bearing seed-cake and coffee beans, blonde hair curled high in identical curls, wearing the same thin white blouses, with the same buttons bursting apart under the thrust of their ripe breasts. They share the same swooping, raucous laugh, the same mocking geniality: both show off engagement rings, one diamond, one emerald. Chloe likes them. She does not understand Oliver’s horror of these bouncing girls. He whispers to her what he never thought to tell anyone – the bath times, when they, the big-girls, bathed him, the baby, and raised his little winkie high, and let it fall, and laughed in the most good-natured way, but laughed. She shakes her head in horror for him.
All the same, confidences or not, Oliver asks Chloe to move her slippers from under the bed, in case they are seen. Chloe is a shiksa and every now and then he feels it.
Chloe faints. Hunger, or pregnancy? Soon she is being sick in the mornings. Pregnant, of course. Well, Oliver does not like rubbers, neither does Chloe. Besides, she has a kind of half-belief that she cannot get pregnant, that she’s not a grown woman but still a child, and has managed to impart this vision of herself to Oliver. A couple of months when she could have got pregnant and didn’t reinforce their mutual belief. The third month she is pregnant, and who more surprised than Chloe and Oliver?
That kind of thing only happens to other people. They do nothing, while they try to assimilate the rather indigestible richness of this new experience.
Chloe swells and burgeons and cannot hide her condition from the Lady Bursar when she comes inquiring after Chloe’s moral welfare. ‘We are in loco parentis, you know.’ Chloe next receives a polite letter from the Chancellor’s office asking her to leave the university, as it appears she is not benefiting from the course of instruction offered, and the waiting lists are long. There is no point in arguing, since by the next post comes a letter from her local Education Office saying that her grant has been stopped. Clearly, to be an unmarried mother is no easy matter, though in truth to be educated no longer seems important. She can look after Oliver if she does not have to go to lectures.
Although Chloe and Oliver spend two weeks composing a tactful letter to Gwyneth, the latter is still upset when she receives their news. She gets flu and is in bed for a full week. In all the years at the Rose and Crown she has never before been ill. Mrs Leacock stops half her wages.
40
Procreate and multiply. Harder than you might think for Marjorie, Grace and me. And to think how easily the cows and the bees and the stickleback and the toad and the spider seem to manage! In their various ways, of course; and no doubt the courtship habits of the widow spider are more bizarre than any behaviour pattern displayed by any of us. But of course they have no choice. They merely respond to the stimuli.
Show a red brick to a female stickleback and whoosh, away go her eggs, spurting out to take their chance. She’s got no say. It simply happens. And no-one thinks to blame her. No-one says but you should have laid those eggs on a warmer day – poor little things! �
�� and in a patch of the river so full of pike, and so fast-flowing, what were you thinking of! Better they had been never born at all, than subjected to such hardship, you must agree, you wicked, thoughtless mother? Just whoosh, away they went, and no comment.
Whoosh, away Grace went, in such a calm, clear untroubled patch of water too. Private nurses, private hospital, her own gynaecologist, nanny waiting on the sidelines to catch the baby from the monthly nurse.
A son, too, what Christie wanted. And all that money, and all those flowers, to soften the blow.
First babies are all blows, make no mistake about it. Duck when you see one coming. The child-wife becomes a mother. The status-wife becomes a messy cowering helpless thing. Listen to her. Listen to the chorus. Help me, look after me, cosset me, she cries. Me and baby. What precious vulnerable things we are, and yes, I must have a blue ceiling for baby to stare at, you beast. Paint it when you get home from work and can’t you get home earlier? LOOK AFTER ME, you bastard! Of course we can’t go to the party, what about my milk supply. No, you can’t go by yourself.
As for him, he’s impossible, more of a baby than the baby itself: pernickety about food, going mad from lack of sleep; he gets drunk, throws tantrums, falls ill, throws baby in the air for fun and fails to catch it when it falls. Oh loving husband, loving father, where are you? And we were going to be so happy, so complete, so different from everyone else! She, the monumental dangerous she, pads about the house, belly and breasts all swollen, desperate, distraught, wondering who this monster is she’s married. A baby to cope with, and a madman too!
Tout casse, tout lasse.
When Helen was having Marjorie, look what Dick went and did. And see the trouble that led to!
Tout passe, tout casse.
When Piers was two weeks old, Christie, then working on designs for a Fashion Pavilion for the 1951 Exhibition, made some serious structural errors, found out, and couldn’t be bothered calling the plans back for correction.
Well, Christie hadn’t slept for a week, had he, and Grace’s lovely nipples were inflamed and cracked and when he touched them she screamed, so he fired the monthly nurse, who had clearly been criminally negligent, with five minutes’ notice and five months’ pay, and then, of course, another couldn’t be found for three whole days during which time Grace sobbed and called for her dead mother and her friends, clustering round the bed, glowered at him as if he were some kind of villain.
Oh, nightmares!
When Inigo was three weeks old Oliver went off on a fishing trip. He couldn’t work with a baby in the house, and he had a script to finish. Near the water, he was always more productive.
Two weeks after Petra was born Christie swept Grace off on a holiday to the Bahamas, leaving the baby behind. He needed a rest from babies, he said. While he was away the roof of the half-finished pavilion fell in killing three people – two of them only plebs, builders – but the other one his Chief Assistant. No-one left uncrushed so much as to murmur of criminal negligence; and actually Grace didn’t even get to hear about it, she was in a hospital in the Bahamas with a milk ulcer. The operation was clumsily done; she has a scar on her bosom to this day. Christie sued, but won only £2,500 damages and a lot of publicity. Breasts being news and deaths not.
Oh babies! The blows fall hard upon the neonate, a little softer on the multipara; being anticipated, merely hurt the more. A duller pain, perhaps, not quite so piercing.
When Esther was in hospital giving birth to Stephen, Edwin was lifting his potatoes and putting in daffodil bulbs, to please her in the spring. She never saw them, and nor did he, or knew that he had conceded her the victory.
As for Patrick – well! He painted mousy Midge at every stage of her pregnancy with Kevin, and wanted to paint her giving birth, except Midge’s father whisked his daughter away in an ambulance just in time – well, not in time, Kevin was born on the hospital steps, even more publicly than if she’d stayed at home – and Patrick was so angry he said let her father visit her. why should I? I’m superstitious about hospitals. And he didn’t visit at all. And when Midge was giving birth in St George’s, to Kestrel, Patrick was with Grace in the very next labour room, holding her hand as she gave birth to Stanhope. Just as well somebody was there – it was Christmas Eve and the nurses were singing carols in the wards, and the interns had been drinking.
Never conceive in March, Grace would say, afterwards, not if you carry to maturity. Never have a baby at Christmas.
41
Chloe’s baby miscarries at five months. Chloe cries and so does Oliver. Something is lost, they both feel it. They have been attacked by outside forces, and something has been taken from them. Yet what pleasure it is to weep together, to be each so identified with the other that loss for one is loss for both, and comfort likewise?
Chloe and Oliver are married in Bristol Register Office in superstitious haste, before worse befalls. It is too late, of course, for the baby, and for Chloe’s degree, but not for each other. It also means that Oliver can get a married student’s grant, double what he is getting already, and that he and Chloe can live in moderate comfort, while he studies, and she cooks and warms his bed, and, both agree, has the best of the bargain.
Good days. Unmarried students flock to their attic door, to see what marriage is like.
Chloe does not write to tell Gwyneth that she is getting married, only that she has lost the baby. Why not? Perhaps she feels Gwyneth has so little happiness of her own she might be tempted to steal her daughter’s by disapproving of the match, or crying, or worse, smiling her small brave smile throughout the ceremony, and raising her eyebrows at the frivolity of this secular occasion; or perhaps it was that Chloe, somehow, hoped to save her mother from the pain of the memory of her own marriage, and widowhood, and the realization that now her life was over, and Chloe’s begun.
Either way, whether prompted by nervousness or kindness, Chloe, most unkindly, does not write.
Oliver, likewise, keeps the marriage secret from his family. Why? Well, his sisters were married at about the time of Chloe’s miscarriage, in a spectacular double ceremony of joy and lamentation mixed, which costs Oliver’s father all his savings in food, ritual, flowers and orchestra, and which Oliver fails to attend, by virtue of tearing an achilles tendon as he boards the train on his way to the wedding. The pain is acute, his paralysis total – how he writhes and groans on the platform; Chloe, seeing him off (not asked herself, of course) is faint with shock and pity – his sisters (he presumes, for they never write) offended, and his father (he assumes) hurt to the quick by the nebbish nature of his atheistical if academic son. Does Oliver wish to compound the hurt (as people will when they discover they have hurt, and never meant to) by keeping his own marriage secret – or was the marriage itself the intended hurt? For in Rudore family mythology, shiksas are for laying, not for marrying, and who more shiksa than Chloe, that Christian girl of now scandalous repute?
If you had asked Oliver at the time, he would have looked blank and said ‘It is nothing to do with my family whom I marry, or how, or when, or why.’
And he would have said whom, not who, because that was in his nature too.
When Oliver has his degree – and to his dismay he gets a Third Class Honours degree and not the First he has predicted for himself – he and Chloe move to London. They live in a bed-sitting room in Battersea, beneath the towers of the Power Station, which sends out a cloud of black smoke to cloak the air above them. For this was in the days before London became the clean and almost sparkling place it is now, and fogs and smogs harassed the life and lung of its inhabitants.
Chloe, without any academic qualifications to speak of after fifteen years continuous study, feels herself lucky to get a job as a counter assistant in the British Home Stores selling twin-sets – those short-sleeved round-necked jumpers each partnered by a long-sleeved cardigan in the same (and usually pastel) shade. Sometimes she is moved to the jewelry section, where the strings of mock pearls, which complete
the effect of the twin-sets, are sold. She enjoys her work – folding, smoothing, measuring, handling – her every movement neat, precise, feminine and controlled. Her capacity for dedication is immense. She is very soon offered promotion to assistant manager, but declines. To accept would mean an extra half-hour’s work a day, and arriving home later than Oliver. She feels she ought to be back before her husband, to have the room warmed and the tea ready. The fogs and smogs make him cough.
It is to Chloe such an astonishing and unlikely pleasure thus to have the legal and permanent enjoyment of a man that she becomes almost religious, for fear of God’s revenge. She will call in at the Catholic Church on her way home to light candles and placate Him.
And still she does not tell Gwyneth she is married. She writes, but does not visit.
Oliver works variously as a supply teacher, as assistant floor manager for BBC radio and as Welsh Rarebit maker at Lyons and so on, but his views are (according to his employers) arrogant and impossible, and he is fired from positions whence no-one has been fired before – a matter for some pride to both Chloe and him.
What an original person Oliver is – so brave, honest and full of integrity. Ah, she loves him! Oliver hates the rich, the powerful, the smug, the beautiful, and the successful. Oliver equates virtue with failure, and integrity with poverty. Oliver sleeps badly; he wakes shrieking from nightmares; he suffers atrociously from migraines, indigestion, bronchitis, hangovers and depression. Well, she knew all that.
Chloe shares Oliver’s distresses gladly. She lives through his depressions, soothes his migraines, appreciates his writings, nurses his indigestion, endures his rages – knowing them to be with himself and not with her, however loud he shouts and however many plates he throws, and however many tears she, in the end, is forced to shed. And knowing that, come nightfall, and the wearing thin of his anger, he will look surprised, and clasp her to him, loving her as much as he loves himself – and what more than this can any woman ask of any man? These too, it seems, are happy times. And the light from this happiness casts a glow both before and after in both their lives.
