by Weldon, Fay
Now, for once, Chloe feels actively responsible for his sleepless, agitating nights. She prepares to take a job in a rather shoddy department store in Cambridge as a trainee buyer. Oliver, on hearing what the salary is to be, tells her that she is wasting her time and her life, and her family’s happiness and future, but for once Chloe persists. She employs Thérèse, underpays and overworks her on Oliver’s instructions, and is irritated by her long-suffering face. She, Chloe, at least suffers cheerfully. Did not Esther Songford once tell her so to do? She nags and snaps at poor Thérèse.
And if Thérèse, running away from her torment, encounters Françoise on Victoria Station so that now she stands on Chloe’s doorstep, is this not exactly what Chloe deserves? Though Thérèse, to be fair, would bring out the bully in anyone.
Thus Chloe describes her household to Françoise, at that initial interview:
Chloe My husband is a writer. He needs peace and quiet and a tidy house if he’s to function properly. His digestion is delicate, and he cannot eat eggs, they give him stomach cramps. He will not eat carbohydrates for he is watching his weight, and we steer clear as much as possible of animal fats for fear of cholesterol in his blood-stream. Within these limits, he likes to eat very well. He has a light continental breakfast in bed – just coffee and bread and butter, but the bread must be fresh, which means we make our own. I’ll continue to do that in the meantime – I let the dough rise overnight and then pop the loaves in the oven an hour before his breakfast. As for coffee, it must be made with freshly ground beans – he cannot bear the taste of instant coffee. It seems to get into his lungs. We have some trouble getting good quality beans, but now I’m going into Cambridge to work I can of course pick some up in my lunch-hour. But do remind me! Don’t let me forget, it makes such a bad start to the day. Inigo is eighteen and is in his last year at the Comprehensive. Imogen is eight and goes to primary school just down the road. She comes home for lunch. Three other children stay at half-term and holidays – Kevin and Kestrel, fourteen and twelve, and Stanhope, also twelve. They share a birthday – Christmas Eve. We haven’t much domestic machinery, I’m afraid, we like to live naturally. But I’ll help with the washing. You know what boys are. Fortunately everyone’s quite healthy except for Oliver’s migraines. And he suffers dreadfully from insomnia. His nights are a battle against it, and when he sleeps, he has nightmares. We have separate rooms. We have to. I snore, I’m afraid. I don’t throw off colds easily and I get stuffed up – and, well... I need someone to run the household while I’m at work. Feed, clothe, care for everyone. Not so much an au pair, or a household help, as a replacement.
Françoise You want someone to replace you?
Françoise’s brown eyes are bright and somehow shuttered. She has hairy moles upon her chin, strong fat forearms and short legs. She looks stupid, but she is not.
‘Yes,’ says Chloe, ‘I want someone to replace me.’
And so she does. At this point in her marriage she would gladly leave Oliver.
For Oliver finds fault with Chloe all the time. If she rises from the table she is restless. If she sits at it she is lazy. If she talks she is yacketing. If she is silent she is sulky. Chloe cannot bear to lie in the same bed with Oliver. She suffocates. Oliver says Chloe’s snores keep him awake: his wife has enlisted on the Enemy Insomnia’s side. Chloe moves to another bedroom. Chloe has no weapons left.
The children’s eyes are anxious. They watch their parents carefully. Imogen sulks. Inigo’s face gets spotty.
And how can Chloe leave? Where can Chloe go? Oliver might make himself responsible for Inigo, but there would still be Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope to provide for, and without Oliver’s money, how could Chloe do it? Is there a divorce court in all the land which would agree with her that Oliver was unkind? She doubts it. Courts of Law are staffed by men. And perhaps the law would be right, and Oliver was not unkind, and it was she herself who was impossible, alternately restless, lazy, yackety, sulky, and frigid.
She who once lay so close to Oliver, slept soundly with her legs thrust between his; or half-asleep, embracing, knew herself to be exalted from her daytime body into that other night-time self, into that grand compulsive being which nightly rides the surging horses of the universe – she, Chloe, frigid! Her daytime self in full possession even when asleep – mean, aggrieved, resentful, out of tune with the rhythms of the earth; spiteful too – killing the kitchen pot plants with a glance.
It might be parasites which do the damage, of course, but Oliver says they die because Chloe has failed to water them.
Yes. Certainly Françoise can replace her. Certainly!
43
One morning, when Françoise has been with her for six months, Chloe stands in her kitchen drinking a cup of coffee before running to catch the bus to take the train to get to work in Cambridge. It is term time. Inigo has left for his school. Françoise has taken Imogen along to hers. Françoise now works there on Tuesday mornings as a speech therapist, an arrangement which suits Françoise very well. It would have suited Chloe well, too, had she thought to apply for the job.
Oliver, in an evil mood (she knows by the forward curve of his shoulders), comes into the kitchen, and thus the conversation goes:
Oliver Chloe, I have something to tell you.
Chloe Could you tell me this evening? I don’t want to be late for work.
Oliver This is rather vital, actually, to all our interests. But since it concerns people and their happiness and not pay-packets, I can understand you wouldn’t think it very important. Off you go, my dear. Don’t miss your bus whatever you do. Or there’ll be a shortage of maroon crimplene in Cambridge tomorrow! Off you go to your chosen profession, Chloe.
Chloe sits down and takes off her gloves.
Chloe I’ll take the next bus.
Oliver Thank you. I’m touched at your concern for your family. You must be the only woman left in the country who wears gloves.
Chloe I’m sorry if they irritate you. I only wear them because it’s cold in the mornings and the bus isn’t heated. If you’d let me take the car I wouldn’t have to wear gloves.
Oliver Chloe, last time you drove the car you ruined the exhaust. If you haven’t the sense to realize you can drive forward over a ditch but not backwards, you’re scarcely fit to be driving. Anything might happen.
Chloe It wasn’t a ditch, it was a bump in someone’s drive. It could have happened to anyone.
Oliver I’m not criticizing or scolding, merely saying when you drive I’m worried stiff, and then I can’t write, and if I don’t finish this novel soon God knows where the next penny will come from.
Chloe From films, I suppose.
Oliver I’m not going back to writing that crap.
Chloe Are you worried for the car, or me?
Oliver For you. You’re in a bad mood, Chloe. Perhaps you’d better get off to your office, after all.
Chloe I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was provocative.
Oliver (Magnanimous) That’s all right. I’m irritable myself. I’m not used to worrying about money. There’ve been so many expenses lately, what with your publishers to pay off.
Chloe Oliver, they are still prepared to publish, amazingly enough; don’t you think it would be possible just to show the manuscript to your sisters and see if they recognized themselves?
Oliver Thank you. I don’t want to be sued by my own family. My early life was made miserable enough by litigation. I couldn’t stomach any more of it.
Chloe has gone too far. And she has missed her bus. Home and office will both be a source of misery for the next few days.
Oliver I came into the kitchen because I had something important to say and I have been deflected yet again into rancour and argument. I don’t want to argue with you, Chloe. It tears me to bits. I want to talk calmly and rationally about Françoise.
Chloe Oh yes. Françoise. I know about that.
Oliver How?
Chloe I make the beds.
Oliver I pay Françoise to make the beds.
Chloe She has quite enough to do. And actually, I pay her.
Oliver She has taken over your work; it is perfectly proper that you should share your pay-packet with her.
Chloe I’m not complaining.
Oliver I am. It leaves you hardly anything to contribute towards the expenses. Running this house is turning into a nightmare. The children are monstrously extravagant – no-one makes the slightest effort to control them. I find lights left on all night – even radios. And of course the holidays are coming up and the bastard tribe will be arriving—
Chloe (Ferocious) None of them are bastards.
Oliver I was joking, Chloe. See how you are spoiling for trouble? Things are too bad: the strain is intolerable. How can I write if I don’t have domestic peace?
Chloe If we slept together again – I mean, just share a room.
Oliver You snore. It drives me mad.
Chloe Or at least—
Oliver No.
Chloe It’s ever since Imogen was born.
Oliver You’re obsessed. That was eight years ago. I’ve accepted the child as my own. What more do you expect?
Chloe But you haven’t accepted me back.
Oliver What nonsense you talk. You had a perfect right to sleep with Patrick Bates if that was what you wanted to do. We should all be free to follow our sexual inclinations.
Chloe Like Françoise, you mean.
Oliver Yes.
Chloe (In tears) Imogen spoilt everything, didn’t she.
And so she did, the pretty little thing, with her long legs and her blue eyes, and her reddish hair and her cleft chin, and her everlasting chatter. Wrenching Oliver and Chloe apart, like a surgeon’s knife parting Siamese twins, obliging them henceforth to live their separate lives. It seemed there was a hole torn in Oliver’s side, from which the living energy flowed.
Buzz-buzz, goes Patrick through Oliver’s life, another buzz-bomb; wham-bam it falls, and there’s ruin and destruction, nothing left of anyone’s efforts. Broken things are broken: patch and mend as you like, make the damage unnoticeable to strangers, yet you who saw it broken know it’s not the same.
Oliver looks at Imogen and goes through the motions of fatherhood, and his riven side hurts as if a sword had been driven into it.
Oliver goes to the doctor again and again about the pain in his side but the doctor finds no physical cause for it.
(‘It will be stigmata next,’ says Grace to Chloe. And Chloe, next time she sees Marjorie, says that Grace is impossible to communicate with, these days, so clever-clever she’s become. ‘All words and no feeling,’ complains Chloe to Marjorie, her friend, of Grace, her other friend.)
‘Imogen spoilt nothing,’ says Oliver now. ‘I’ll see Françoise gets back to her room by morning. We mustn’t confuse the children. And you must remember I love you very much. And that Françoise helps me sleep.’
‘Don’t you find her rather hairy?’ asks Chloe.
‘It’s a sign of passion,’ says Oliver, and Chloe does not pursue the matter further, for fear of a pain which seems threatening to constrict her chest, but which, if she is careful, will never quite emerge to consciousness.
‘I’ve missed my bus,’ Chloe says, miserably.
‘I’ll drive you,’ says Oliver, generously, and does, and on the way in to Cambridge tries to explain some of his antagonism to her going out to work. He needs Chloe at home, he says. He only feels secure if she’s at home. And now he is getting on well with his novel, he really needs to have her at hand during the day to read aloud to, so he can properly balance the sentences. No, of course Françoise won’t do. She is foreign. Besides, he doesn’t respect her judgement or her creativity, as he does Chloe’s. It is Chloe he needs, she mustn’t think otherwise. She is his wife. He has all his emotions invested in her, he explains, and his past, and his present, and his future. It is just in this one very small and insignificant sexual area that he needs another younger person who doesn’t snore and who responds properly and naturally and Françoise fits the bill very well, besides taking the domestic load off Chloe. Perhaps Chloe could ask the Head Buyer for three months’ leave of absence, just during the middle period of his novel? Which is now. If her employers value her services, they’ll be happy enough to oblige.
Chloe asks. Chloe loses her job.
‘You weren’t cut out for it,’ says Oliver, ‘or you would have made more impact. They’d have kept you on at any cost, just so long as they could make a profit out of you. You’re well out of it: you were miserable and exhausted and bad-tempered all the time. You were beginning to get chilblains.’
Chloe recovers her temper and Oliver from his displeasure, and the household falls into a placid rhythm. The children breathe again and flourish.
Françoise goes to bed at midnight, lies awake for an hour, and then moves from her own bed to Oliver’s at precisely one in the morning, and goes back to her own bed at two, having prepared Oliver a hot cup of chocolate to help him sleep. She gets up at eight to help Chloe with the children’s breakfast. Chloe gets up at seven-thirty to put the bread in the oven for Oliver’s nine o’clock breakfast. It needs half an hour to bake and a full hour to cool. Hot bread, as everyone knows, is indigestible.
Chloe sits in Oliver’s room between midday and two o’clock (Imogen, not over-fond of Françoise, has chosen to eat school dinners, cabbage and all), and waits for Oliver to read to her. Occasionally there is something to be heard; usually there is silence. Oliver will type busily from ten to eleven, read over and think about what he has written from eleven to twelve, and then, as like as not, scribble everything out. Presently he says he thinks perhaps Chloe’s presence inhibits his creative flow, and thereafter she sits in the living room waiting for his summons. After a time the summonses cease coming, and one spring morning she takes it on herself to go to London for the day, and talk to her friends. Grace and Marjorie.
Both of whom, come to think of it, have their own troubles. If they have little time or energy left for Chloe, beyond a cursory, ill-considered and possibly even malevolent ‘divorce him! Leave him! throw her out!’ is that surprising; or more than she deserves? All the same, she is hurt.
44
Marjorie, Grace and me.
Marjorie is well acquainted with death. Her sad brown eyes seem created for its contemplation, her sturdy feet for the stirring of a dead body on the floor. Patrick Bates once said she smelt of death, and that is why of all the women in the world, having slept with her once he never would again. Her skin was dry even in adolescence – it flaked away as if it was dying, not growing.
As a child Marjorie would bravely pick up dead birds and bury them – maggots and all. The rest of us looked the other way.
Being so accustomed to death, it seems that she has trouble facing life. She prefers the world on the page, or pictures flickering on the screen. The media world is full of such refugees from reality.
Marjority tried once. Yes she did. Living with her Ben, carrying his six months’ child. Two days after Ben died Marjorie started to bleed, just gently, and feel generally uncomfortable, so she called the doctor. He came at once, to her surprise, and she lay on the bed while he talked and chatted and kept her cheerful. Not that she was uncheerful.
‘If I keep it, that’s good,’ she says. ‘If I lose it, that’s good too.’
He was a small fine-boned man, like an elf. She liked him. He’d seen many people die.
He told her what her chances were of keeping the baby and not miscarrying. Fifty-fifty, don’t despair, he said, and she didn’t.
But through the evening the chances worsened, the odds shortened.
A pain. Yes a contraction. Gone again, but forty-sixty, I’m afraid. But you never know! Think happy thoughts, girl. He calls the ambulance, nonetheless.
A sudden flow of blood, stopping soon. Thirty-seventy. Pregnancy suits her. Her skin stops flaking, her complexion clears, she feels placid and conten
t. Even her hair grows silky and falls in waves about her face. She hasn’t told her mother. She didn’t want her mother, for once, to turn up and change everything.
A pain, this time the face distorting. Marjorie lies more flatly on the bed. Twenty-eighty, he thinks. Poor little baby, breaking free; or else cast out by a host too shocked to shelter it, who’s to say? Too small, at any rate, to survive. No ambulance, as yet. It has lost its way.
More blood, more groans, the legs parting.
Ten-ninety.
Five-ninety five.
One-ninety nine.
Nil-one hundred.
Good-bye baby. Here you come.
Life does not continue.
Grace gets in first, of course. Grace murders. Grace has abortions. Like having a tooth out, she says. She looks forward to it. All that drama, she says, and distracted men, and the anaesthetics are lovely, and you wake up with no sense of time passed. What luxury! Marjorie says that if Grace had done what her father wanted her to, and looked after the infant Stephen, her baby brother, she might not afterwards have disposed of foetuses with such abandon. I, Chloe, think it is due more to the way Christie battered the maternal instinct out of her, than anything else. For Grace did have such an instinct once – she wailed like an animal for her stolen children.
I heard her. It is the reason I look after Stanhope for her, and the reason Oliver allows me to. We understand why poor Grace can’t. We witnessed it.
I have never seen a dead person, only coffins, but I have imagined the body within and taken responsibility for it. I would have a dozen children if I could; if Oliver and commonsense allowed. The answer to death is life, and more life, which is why the world is getting so overcrowded. Or so they say.
Leave Oliver, Marjorie says. Divorce him, Grace says. Save yourself, they both say. If only they seemed more saved themselves.
