by Weldon, Fay
Chloe Oliver, really, I am not a lesbian. Don’t be ridiculous.
He bends and kisses her, indulgently. She sits up, pushing him away. Oliver goes and sits beside Françoise, running his fingers down her spine.
Chloe You are quite ridiculous. I don’t care what you say, any more, or what you do.
And she doesn’t. Her sincerity seems both to impress Oliver and take him aback. He turns Françoise on to her back. She has been crying.
Oliver You do care, Chloe. I’ll make you care. You’re not just going to sit there now and watch me and not care. You can’t.
Chloe I can.
Chloe’s head is quite clear. She is her own woman again. She can and she does. She watches Oliver go through the motions of intercourse with Françoise with as much dispassion as she watches her children bathe themselves. Françoise continues to cry, from exhaustion and now apparently fright, turning her head this way and that to avoid Oliver’s mouth, while Oliver takes what can only be termed his desperate and dubious pleasure in her.
Françoise, disengaged, continues to cry.
Françoise I am sorry to cry. I am so tired. Why is my life so wretched?
Oliver Because you’re a silly stupid bourgeois bitch and not a liberated lady at all. Go back to bed, for God’s sake.
Françoise goes. Oliver, Chloe sees to her amazement, has tears in his eyes.
Oliver I’m sorry, Chloe. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I think I’m mad.
Chloe. So do I.
Chloe finds she is laughing, not hysterically, or miserably, but really quite lightly and merrily; and worse, not with Oliver, but at him, and in this she is, at last, in tune with the rest of the universe.
54
Working-class women, Grace believes, have a rather better time of it than the middle classes – apart from starvation, disease, over-work, miscarriages, exhaustion and so on, of course. But in their personal lives, they have fewer expectations and for that reason, fewer disappointments. They put up with their husbands in bed, take their weekly money in return, pack them off to pubs and football matches, and get on with their own lives.
Marjorie maintains that the great, gnawing, devitalizing vice of the middle classes is pretending to be nice when they aren’t. Patrick, she says, in the eyes of women of aspiring gentility and/ or depleted nervous energy, smacks of the working classes, rumbling away with a raw, suppressed and vital energy, which must one day inevitably overwhelm and overcome, as the male overwhelms the female. Of course such women fall prostrate at his feet, welcoming the inevitable orgasmic defeat – and with it the expected punishment not just of their class presumptions, but for their female exploitativeness – which in turn is the product of their own exploitation.
‘Marjorie sees Marx in everything,’ Grace complains to Chloe, ‘and from the point of view of a female who always lies beneath the male. I’m dreadfully sorry for her. Why doesn’t she get on top?’
Her own long-drawn-out affair with Patrick, in and out of the ruin of both their days, seems to bring her little happiness – as Marjorie frequently remarks.
‘Poor Grace,’ says Marjorie, ‘what a burnt-out case she is. Fancy putting your faith in sexual athletics. Grace uses Patrick as a memory of better times, of course, when she still had some feeling left in her. As for Patrick, he doesn’t take her to Christie’s grave because he adores her – as she tells everyone – but to annoy Midge and because he likes the shape those dreadful headstones make against the sky.’
While Grace plays fast and loose through the sixties, her thirties, invincibly fashionable – in and out of water beds and topless dresses and the occasional acid-trip, into the occult, and flying saucers, astrology and force fields, and finding therein, of course, cosmic justification for her quite irrational persecution of the unfortunate Geraldine: taking up prison reform after a night in the cells for disorderly behaviour in a Chelsea pub (coincidentally called the Rose and Crown), vying with Patrick, one might almost think, in the number and variety of her sexual exploits – though unlike Patrick never putting brush to canvas, as she would have been better employed in doing, if only to demonstrate to the world that she, like him, suffered from the disease of artistic talent and did not merely exhibit its more disagreeable and anti-social symptoms; aborting frequently instead (an outer and visible sign of an inner and spiritual state, Marjorie maintains, underlining her determination to destroy and not create) – while Grace thus plays fast and loose with herself and her fate, Marjorie plays safe.
‘Marjorie is very wise not to marry,’ says Grace. ‘She is the sort of woman born to be widowed five times. Her husbands would just drop dead one after another – you know how it happens – if not from poison then from sheer suggestion. Well, look at Marjorie’s record. First her father, then her Ben, then her baby. She’s best to stay where she is, putting the finger of death on television programmes.’
And it is certainly true that Marjorie appears to avoid any personal commitment to anything other than a programme or a department. She battles with organizations rather than with people. She engages in a paper war of inter-office memos, fighting for position up the telephone list, to head first this section, then that, scaling the sides of the orthodox organizational pyramid the planners have made of the BBC; her name eventually there in leaded black, as near the apex as a woman can get.
‘She only visits Patrick in the hopes of getting in touch with her younger self,’ says Grace, ‘when she was altogether more hopeful of life. Doing his washing makes her feel she’s female. Well, what else is going to? She’s the only woman in the world he doesn’t fancy. It can’t be very nice for her, though God knows these days he smells rather rancid and his feet are beginning to rot.’
Marjorie has her family, though. She acquires a set of homosexual friends. They cluster round her like a set of lost and earnest chickens: in the warmth of their chattering, clucking regard Marjorie acquires a kind of glow: the silence of her nights are punctured with gossip and laughter. They warm her little hands, admire her cleverness, bring her little gifts. Together, she and they make giggling, anxious excursions to junk and antique shops, collecting little goodies, little treasures, little bygones, bargains all. Forever, and how positive an act it is, rescuing what is good from what is past. Marjorie develops a visual taste: her bleak flat begins to be a place of interest. She talks knowledgeably about Victorian biscuit tins, Lalique and Tiffany. She learns how to cook coq-au-vin, and not just spaghetti bolognese. But presently her friends drift off as they have drifted in. The biscuit tins look rusty rather than quaint: she drops and breaks her best Lalique plate: she starts opening cans of baked beans again.
‘Nothing good lasts,’ she says sorrowfully to Chloe. ‘After they passed that Consenting Adults Bill, and they could go about together openly, they seemed to lose their need of me. We’d quarrel and bitch properly, not just camping it up. And I began to feel they were mocking me and using me; they’d always pretended to, of course, but now it was for real. It was as if their lives had become serious at last, instead of just the play-acting it had always had to be, and so I couldn’t be part of it any more. I’m glad for them, but sorry for me. I miss them. It was nice to have one’s lack of bosom an asset and not a liability.’
As for Chloe, she grits her teeth and sticks to her marriage and children as a shoemaker to his last. The lives of the spiritually unmarried, and the spiritually childless, seem sad to her.
This morning Chloe is woken up by the sound of laughter. It frightens her at first, until she realizes it is her own, and not that of some stranger in her bedroom.
The sun shines through her window. It is another brilliant day. The winter has been short and mild – which is why, no doubt, the greenfly are so active so early in the year. If the climate is changing, thinks Chloe, should I remain the same?
It is eight o’clock. Chloe should get up and supervise the baking of Oliver’s rolls. Françoise tends to forget them, and leave them in the oven too long, s
o they become dried out, and the crust a danger to Oliver’s increasingly brittle teeth. Chloe lies in her virtuous bed a little longer. Then, when the smell of burning bread fills the room with an almost tangible cloud, she rises in temper, puts on her dressing-gown and goes into the kitchen.
Françoise, this morning, seems determined to deny her sex. She wears a white tee-shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of Inigo’s sneakers. Her ripe female form, unintimidated, bulges alarmingly beneath. She is breathless with nervous distress, and wishes to ingratiate herself with Chloe, who merely throws open the windows in clattering and ill-tempered reproach.
Chloe Have you no sense of smell at all, Françoise?
Françoise Please, do not upset me. I have scraped the rolls. Oliver will not notice.
Chloe I am afraid he will.
Françoise On such a morning such things are not important.
Chloe You are mistaken. The morning is not important in the least, the rolls are. If you disbelieve me, take in Oliver’s breakfast yourself, today.
Françoise You are cross when you should be loving. I want only to love and be loved. To be properly close to those I love most in the world. You and Oliver. And all your lovely family.
Chloe You should not get too close to Inigo’s shoes, Françoise. He has chronic athlete’s foot.
Françoise But I see I have upset you. I cannot forgive myself. I wanted only to make you happy. But your heart is closed to me. You believe that sex is for procreation. Therefore you can only conceive of it with the opposite sex. I disgust you. To you sex is something shameful. To me it is a sacrament; I grieve for you that you cannot share something so joyous with me.
Chloe I can only assume you are not familiar with athlete’s foot, or you would not take it so lightly.
Françoise dissolves into hiccoughing tears, which turn Chloe cold with anger and embarrassment. She feels the desire to hurt Françoise as much as possible. Is this what Oliver feels? Why Françoise’s breasts are black and blue? What pleasure there is in withholding affection, when it is both deserved and desperately needed.
Françoise You are unkind to me. I want to go home. But there is even worse than here. I lived intimately with my best friend the confectioner. She swore she loved me: she hated men, she said. When she made a wedding cake, she would drive a pin through the heart of the sugar groom. But then she eloped with my fiancé: she accused me to him of being a lesbian and seducing her, and so he hated me and married her. But the truth was the other way round. Why must people play when they should be serious?
Chloe Heaven knows.
Françoise I want to go home, where I am taken seriously.
Chloe I think Oliver takes you very seriously, Françoise. And I very much hope you will stay. I think you must, if only for the sake of literature. Only please will you try not to cry in front of the children? And will you now take Oliver’s breakfast in to him?
But Françoise will not. Chloe goes. Chloe takes Oliver his breakfast tray, sits on the edge of the bed, and talks soothingly about crocuses, daffodils, and Inigo’s athlete’s foot.
Oliver I am not mad, Chloe. There is no need to humour me. I am sorry about last night.
Chloe Let us not talk about it. I am sure that what happens at night is nothing to do with our daily selves. I am sorry the rolls are burnt.
Oliver Françoise, I suppose?
Chloe Yes.
Oliver That girl will have to go,
Chloe No, no. She’s useful.
And so Françoise is.
Oliver Perhaps I really should abandon the novel, and go back to film scripts.
Chloe Good heavens no. Not after all this.
Oliver If only one could control what one responded to sexually! I promise you, Chloe, that if I could you would head the list. It would save a good deal of trouble and effort, and putting up with really rather stupid people because one can’t resist a hefty arse and heavy tits.
Chloe It must be dreadful to be a man, and so helpless in the face of one’s own nature.
Is she laughing at him? Yes, she is. Her victory is complete.
She does not much enjoy her victory. Mirth cuts at the very roots of her life.
55
During the morning the telephone rings. It is Grace. And thus the conversation goes:
Chloe I thought you were in France, Grace.
Grace What, me? Topless beaches and dirty old men with cameras? You must be joking. I’m far too old to compete, anyway, in the beach girl stakes. Sebastian said so, and he should know, being Competition King himself in the Great Vulgar Life Game. Not that he’ll get there, of course, his plane’s going to fall out of the sky, thank God. We met a fortune teller at a party last night, and he said so, and he’s never wrong about anything. If Sebastian wants to defy fate that’s his business, I told him so at the time. Perhaps you’re not life’s Darling to the degree you think, I said. He didn’t like that. But then I threw the teapot and put myself in the wrong, sod it.
Chloe Grace, is it wise to quarrel with Sebastian if he’s got all your money?
Grace Quarrel? You call that a quarrel? I’ve been down to Out-Patients for stitches in my lip, and my ribs are black and blue. I don’t care about the money. Let him keep it. It was Christie’s anyway. Christie’s last mean revenge, so I’d always be pursued by fortune hunters who defined a fortune as 50p. I’m glad it’s all gone. I can earn, can’t I?
Chloe I don’t know, Grace. You never have.
Grace I must be mad, ringing you up. You’re so pompous and respectable. Such a wet blanket. How’s Oliver? Making you watch?
Chloe Yes.
Grace Wait till I tell Marjorie.
Chloe I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.
Grace Too late. Why do you stay so loyal to that monster? He outwore loyalty years ago. Did you know Marjorie’s mother is in hospital?
Chloe No, I didn’t.
Grace I rang Marjorie in the middle of the night when Sebastian was beating me up but she wasn’t the slightest use, her mother had had a heart attack and that was all she could think about. She’s in intensive care. She’s going to be all right, though. The fuss Marjorie made, you’d have thought she was dying.
Chloe She’s very fond of her mother.
Grace So was I fond of Sebastian. Chloe, I am really very upset. I can’t go on like this for ever. There has to be a kind of truth about one’s life, doesn’t there? And Chloe, do you know what today is?
Chloe No.
Grace Midge has been dead for five years.
Chloe So?
Grace Do you think it was my fault?
Chloe Yes.
Grace I knew it. It’s why you’re so dreadful to me so much of the time. You don’t blame Patrick?
Chloe No. Not any more. You can’t hold men responsible for their actions.
Grace I suppose not. They follow their pricks like donkeys allegedly follow carrots. Though I’ve never seen it myself. Well, that’s all over now. I’m going down to the hospital to be with Marjorie. Will you come?
Chloe Does she want me to?
Grace If you’re going to be someone’s friend, you have to intrude your friendship sometimes.
Chloe Really?
Grace Yes. Give my love to Stanhope, Chloe, you stealer of other people’s children.
Grace rings off. The phone goes almost immediately. This time it is Marjorie.
Marjorie Chloe, it’s mother.
Chloe Yes I know. Grace told me. How is she?
Marjorie Bad news, I’m afraid. It was malignant.
Chloe I don’t understand. Grace said it was a heart attack.
Marjorie Grace gets everything wrong. It was a brain tumour. She might have had it for years, they said. The surgeon asked if she ever acted strangely. What’s normal, I wanted to know, but he couldn’t tell me. Anyway they’ve taken away what they can, and she’s sitting up in bed with her head shaven and a great knitted scar on her temple, plucking her eyebrows. Is that strange or normal?
Chloe It sounds quite lively, Marjorie. And not as if she’s in pain. Do you want me to come down? Grace said she was going to.
Marjorie Oh my God! Did she? Well, she might as well. And she did know mother, and so did you. Come this evening. I hate hospitals. I’m a perfectly competent person until I smell those corridors, then I go to pieces. They won’t say anything. You’re always asking the wrong person, anyway. I said is she going to die, and all they said was we’re all dying, and she is an old lady. What do they mean? Poor little mother. She was always so brave, and everything was so dreadful for her, but she’d always wring some sort of goodness out of the bad.
It doesn’t sound at all like Helen to Chloe, but she says nothing. Poor Helen, she tries to think, but all she remembers is Helen’s disparagement, all those years ago, of her social standing. Little Chloe, the barmaid’s daughter. All those years! Has Chloe really borne this grudge for so long? Yes, Chloe has. It is not Helen’s treatment of Marjorie which causes Chloe’s animosity towards this poor, defeated, bandaged old soul, but this harboured, treasured slight.
Marjorie She’s changed. I don’t know whether it’s sanity or madness, that’s the trouble, but she’s being so nice to me. She calls me my little girl, so proudly. She’s never said anything like that to me before. And she takes my hand and pats it. You know how she usually hates touching anyone.
Chloe I expect it’s sanity, Marjorie.
Marjorie But the nurse said ‘they’re often like this after brain ops.’ I can’t stand it, Chloe.
Chloe You have to stand it, Marjorie. You have no option.
