by Weldon, Fay
‘If you must know,’ said Marion, driven to desperation, ‘she killed herself.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘How?’ So Gemma had bullied Hermione, whose habit it was to come home from school with money from undisclosed resources hidden in her coat pocket.
‘She jumped out of a window.’ And in just such a distressed manner would the truth eventually burst from Hermione’s lips.
‘Why?’
‘She felt like it, I suppose.’
‘What window?’ But Gemma turned cold even as she speaks.
She knew the truth.
‘That window there right behind you, if you want to know, and only last week too, and that’s why Ophelia left. She left in a hurry or she’d never have left her fake nails. They’re such a price!’
‘And everyone else just goes on using the office? Mr First comes in and out, where his own sister... it’s dreadful.’
‘Don’t be silly. All you do when people die is just carry on as usual. If people choose to kill themselves they don’t deserve any respect. And she didn’t die here, she died at the bottom. I daresay Mr First crosses the road directly now, instead of walking along the front of the building to the zebra, but I wouldn’t know for sure, and I wouldn’t think it was my business, anyway. And I’m not going to give up a good job so near to holiday time; and you can’t think what they’ve invested in this building: it’s a swinging London showpiece; they couldn’t possibly move their offices elsewhere.’
Gemma sat trembling in front of the typewriter. Something more serious than the absence of an electricity supply ailed it: now that it was plugged in and switched on the warning lights glowed red, but the carriage would not move. She had only a theoretical knowledge, in any case, of electric typewriters. Chapter Ten: Office Equipment, its Care and Maintenance. ‘A good secretary, like a good housewife...’
‘What’s the matter now?’ Marion had recovered. Her voice was mean and sharp, like Great-Aunt May’s on a bad day.
‘I haven’t been trained to use an electric machine,’ muttered Gemma.
‘No one’s asking you to type.’
‘Then what am I to do?’
‘Take Mr Fox up his coffee.’
‘I’m not the maid.’
‘I don’t know who is, if you’re not. Look, if you don’t like it you can go straight back to the agency, and they’ll find someone else not so squeamish. It’s all the same to me. And you can get a job copytyping in a pool at seven and six an hour, where they deduct from your wages if your hands leave the typewriter. Do you want that?’
‘No.’
Gemma took up the silver tray: the pottery jug, the French green coffee cup and saucer, gold-rimmed. Gemma had pretty hands: she thought these accessories suited them rather well. Then she put the tray down.
‘But Mr Fox went out.’
Mrs Hemsley, did Gemma do that kind of thing to you? Wait until you’d found all five children’s swimming costumes, and swimming caps, and five dry towels, and then disclose that the school swimming pool had been empty for a week?
Gemma did, frequently. Gemma was forgetful. Or so she said. Before Marion could express her anger, Mr First’s door burst open. Mr First waved his small fist in the doorway. Marion went pale.
‘I thought I told you to come straight to my office, Marion.’
‘I’m sorry. Gemma didn’t tell me.’ So much for loyalty.
‘I forgot,’ said Gemma. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr First. ‘I imagine it is your fault. Do you think that because you have a pretty face no one will notice you’re an imbecile? I am astounded by that agency. It sends in girls better fitted to potato picking than office work. Marion, come in at once and take dictation. You’ve kept me waiting at least ten minutes.’
Marion, rebuked and docile, took up her shorthand pad and went into Mr First’s office. Mr First slammed the door. The display mobiles trembled; their chains clanked; the parrots rose screaming in their latticed mosque; lights and colours flashed.
Gemma was alone.
Gemma hated.
Gemma hated all employers. Employers could be rude to her, could insult her, and she could do nothing. She must hold her tongue and just stand there and try not to cry. If she wanted her wages, that is.
‘If I were a man,’ thought Gemma, ‘he wouldn’t talk to me like that –’
And of course he wouldn’t.
Gemma, who seldom wept, now cried into her electric typewriter. She remembered that she was homeless: that she was tired and sleepy, having spent an uneasy night in a train: that she was sitting in a room from the window of which someone had recently plunged to their death: she remembered that she was an orphan: that Mrs Hemsley had proved unkind: that, in spite of a cheese and lettuce roll bought when she went out to get the electric plug for the typewriter, she was still extremely hungry. Gemma laid her head upon her typewriter. She cried a little, and slept a little, and cried and slept some more. Presently she felt a hand upon her shoulder. Young, firm, kindly fingers.
Mr Fox. His cream suit slightly crackling, of so rare and delicate fibre was it made (from the bark of some exotic tree).
Mr Fox. His moustache curling, eyes glinting.
Mr Fox.
‘Ah, coffee,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Rather cold isn’t it? That’s not like our Marion at all. I hope she isn’t falling off.’
At least he hadn’t said falling out: though for a moment Gemma thought he had. But she must surely have misheard.
Mr Fox!
Gemma loved Mr Fox.
6
Love!
‘Love,’ says Gemma grandly, to Elsa, ‘is what the nubile young feel when their search for a mate reaches an appropriate conclusion: it is the tool nature uses to perfect her species. We do not, cannot, choose to love, out of admiration for the other’s spiritual qualities; we love where love seems right, gene calling to gene, as country cats call to each other across fields.
‘Therefore,’ says Gemma, ‘Elsa, I shan’t ask you why you love Victor, I shall simply accept that you do because you say you do. Perhaps your blue eyes need to match his troubled green ones to produce a serene and grey-eyed child?’
‘Oh,’ says Elsa, ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t think either of us wants babies: I mean, it wouldn’t be sensible.’
‘Ah,’ says Gemma, ‘so you mean to join the rest of us? Who, by reason of age, or self-discipline, or common-sense, or fear, or a simple malfunction of fallopian tube or testes, are destined to deny Nature its genetic self-expression?
‘In that case,’ says Gemma grandly, ‘love will be for you what it is for me, the emotion we feel for those who have the capacity to hurt us.
‘Is that what you want, Elsa?
‘Elsa, are you listening?’
‘Does Hamish hurt you?’ asks Elsa, horrified.
‘Yes. He hurts me because he is so often away, making money I enjoy spending. He hurts me because he is sorry for me, and because his inner disabilities are such that they match my more open, more dramatic ones. He hurts me by being tired and ill and unhappy, so that I cannot take credit for making him happy. He hurts me by disliking my friends almost as much as I dislike his. He hurts me by buying antiques himself instead of leaving it to me: I have few pleasures in this world. I love him: so I put up with the hurt he causes me: indeed, it is because he hurts me that I know he loves me, and to live with a husband one loves is good fortune, indeed.
‘And at least he is not unfaithful to me.’
Gemma smiles at Elsa: the smile of a good and loving wife, albeit in a wheelchair.
Elsa smiles at Gemma, wretchedly: the smile of the daughter who has stolen the love of the father, or means to do so.
Gemma smiles.
Elsa loves! How she loves. She is all love.
Elsa loves her mother, but does her mother love her back? Elsa doubts it. Sheila, drinking gin and tonics in the pub with her husband, Elsa’s stepf
ather: her hair newly streaked: laughing and carrying on, no doubt, as if she weren’t the mother of seven children and the eldest of those run off to live with a married man – well, share a Regency sofa with him in the back of an antique shop – and forbidden to darken her door again. ‘You go with that man if you like,’ said Sheila. ‘You’re a big girl now. Give up your job and your bedsitting room and honest folks’ good opinion if you must: ruin some poor woman’s life if that’s how it grabs you, but don’t come back here with your dirty washing for me to do. I don’t know what’s come over you, Elsa, I really don’t.’
Love.
It came over Sheila once, and there she was, carrying Elsa. But that was a long time ago. Not that she’s forgotten. Elsa’s father was a big blond man, a sailor home from the sea, and Sheila has never forgotten. A golden dandelion waved above her nose on the cliffside as Elsa was conceived. Blue sky, blue eyes: gold flower, gold hair. The first of seven, and the best, the very best. Sheila loves Elsa.
‘Out you go, Elsa, and don’t think you’ve got my blessing. You haven’t. And don’t come back here whining at Christmas time because he’s gone back to his wife.’
‘He won’t, mum.’
‘Don’t call me mum. So far as I’m concerned you’re a motherless child. Double gin and tonic please, and don’t forget the ice and lemon.’
Victor, dear. Victor, my love. Block my ears, shut my eyes; your tongue in my every opening, blacking out all memory, all sense. Victor, transport me to other lands, so that what she said can no longer be heard; Victor be my mother, my missing father, my everybody, all my love, for ever and ever. Amen.
Elsa loves Victor more than she fears Gemma.
But Elsa loves her mother. Elsa is a good girl. Elsa opens her mouth to blurt out Gemma’s husband’s proposition, via Victor, and her own acceptance of it.
But Victor stands beside her. Elsa shuts her mouth.
‘Hot!’ he says. ‘How do you keep the plants watered, Gemma? Illegal hose-pipe, after dark?’
‘We have our own well and irrigation system,’ says Gemma. ‘Naturally. Now I must leave you two love-birds together, and see about Wendy and Elsa’s cake. I will have to make it myself, of course. The trouble with Asiatic servants is that not for love nor money can they make a simple sponge.’
How easy it is for Gemma to make an exit, thinks Elsa, enviously. She presses a button and glides away. She, Elsa, using her feet, stumbles, blushes, is misunderstood or fails to understand; leaves, one way or another, with her own inadequacies fresh in everyone’s mind.
‘You made quite a hit with Hamish,’ says Victor to Elsa. ‘There was no need to be quite so enthusiastic.’
‘I won’t if you don’t want me to.’
‘It’s not what I want, it’s what you want. If you don’t want to, I certainly don’t want to put pressure upon you. It’s the last thing I want: you’d never let me forget it. On the other hand, if you want to make me happy, if you want to demonstrate to me that you’re sexually free, and truly liberated and that it’s not all talk, then you certainly will. I spent twenty years with Janice and she was faithful to me and I was faithful to her, and in the end it meant nothing. Except we both missed out. And if I regret anything for Janice it was that – the necessity she felt to be faithful to me. We put ourselves in prison. No one put us there.’
‘What do you mean, you were faithful to Janice? You were always having affairs with your secretaries. You told me so. You were absolutely frank.’
‘Faithless with my body, faithful in my mind. You’ve no idea how guilty I felt. How it spoilt everything.’
‘And I was just the current one when you left Janice,’ says Elsa, full of self-pity. ‘I know all that.’
Victor looks pained.
‘You under-rate yourself, and you under-rate me. I hate it when you talk like that, Elsa. You sound cheap and cynical.’
‘I’m only trying to face facts, Victor.’
And she is, she is. As if all facts were of necessity unpleasant, and all truths hard. He takes her hand: she is trembling.
‘I don’t want you to be unhappy, Elsa. I don’t want to be responsible for that. I made Janice unhappy. I don’t want to do it again.’
Lunch settles Elsa’s nerves, as a free meal served on an aircraft will do much to settle the stomach of any nervous traveller. It is a gift, something thrown in for free, and as in our experience good things and bad things come grouped together, by virtue of the free gift the plane seems the less likely to fall to the ground. The meal is served by the pool, on a glass trolley with gold wheels. It consists of jellied consommé spooned into Waterford tumblers, topped with tinned whipped cream and a spoonful of mock caviar; followed by cold tongue and salad served with bottled salad cream.
‘The culinary taste in this household,’ remarks Victor, ‘is as confused as is its tastes in antiques.’
‘Perhaps,’ remarks Elsa, ‘you will be able to help Gemma there as well.’
‘I hope you are not jealous,’ murmurs Victor. ‘It would hardly be reasonable if you were. Good heavens, a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair!’
Clearly Elsa is being ridiculous.
‘Victor,’ says Elsa presently, ‘what’s a prostate gland?’
‘Not something I wish to consider. Some men have trouble with it in later life. Malfunction interferes with the urinary processes, I believe, and can make one more or less impotent.’
Elsa has not had first-hand experience of a man who has trouble gaining an erection. Indeed, her sexual intimacy so far has been with Victor, whose trouble – if trouble it be – has been the opposite – of confining his manifest erections to convenient and appropriate places.
But Marina’s other friend has a boyfriend who is occasionally impotent, so Elsa is not altogether ignorant of the problem. Tales have got back to her of the embarrassment of lying beneath a man whose member becomes unexpectedly defenceless and childlike, and she and Marina have, helpfully, read and re-read articles in Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Mayfair, Playmate, Penthouse, Forum and magazines of even more explicit and colourful detail, which analyse the condition and suggest cures, some of which Marina thought her duty to pass on to her friend. They were not well received.
‘Why do you want to know?’ asks Victor, now.
‘Never mind,’ says Elsa.
‘It must be very hard for a man not to be able to express physically what he feels emotionally,’ says Victor. ‘At least I’ve never had that problem.’
While Victor and his girlfriend sit in a rich man’s house and eat caviar and jellied consommé, albeit not of the first rank, Victor’s wife Janice and his daughter Wendy sit in their lounge on the outskirts of London and eat fish and chips from newspaper. They finish a half bottle of tomato sauce between them, and use up the last of the sea-salt, left over from the days of Victor’s husbandry. They eat with their fingers; all the cutlery is dirty and stacked in the double sink with the expensive mixer taps. The radio is on in the dream kitchen although no one is listening to it; the hall light is on although it is broad daylight; the television is switched on, although it is the middle of the day and only rubbish showing.
Wendy, who is almost exactly Elsa’s age, but who averts her eyes from newsstands which sell sex magazines, is still in her nightie and dressing gown. She is a plain, plump, peaceful, lazy girl with an interest in embroidery and very little else.
‘Mum,’ says Wendy eventually, ‘it’s rather nice with Dad not here.’
‘Yes,’ says Janice, after a minute or so’s reflection, ‘I know.’
‘Once you’ve got over the shock.’
‘That’s right,’ says Janice, and she puts down her mug of coffee on a polished coffee table and does not even worry in case it leaves a mark, and what would Victor have to say then? And eats yet another chip without worrying about her figure and the appearance she will make at the firm’s Ladies’ Night.
‘When things happen these days they just happen, and no one has a nervous brea
kdown,’ says Wendy. ‘If I haven’t got a boyfriend that’s my bad luck not dad’s. I’ve got a patchwork quilt in the Sale of Work – I didn’t tell you – and I don’t have to dread it not selling. If it does it does, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t.’
Wendy hasn’t said so much for years.
‘Do we have to go and meet him tomorrow?’ Wendy entreats. ‘Supposing he decides to come home?’
Just suppose! For the last twenty years Janice has dutifully considered and talked out with Victor, every practical and emotional problem that has arisen in the home and in the marriage. Just suppose! What then? I feel this. Do you feel that? Of course you do!
Only talk, and you will see.
That I am all in all to thee.
‘Is that unfair of me?’ asks Wendy, in whom there is clearly something of Victor. ‘I suppose you must miss him. For sex and all that,’ she adds kindly.
Since Victor left, Janice has been to bed with the insurance man who came to investigate a claim for a damp bedroom ceiling, and the furniture removal man who came to take away Victor’s quadrophonic sound system, with its extension speakers in the bedroom; and others as well whom she can barely remember. She has discovered the irresistibility of sexual opportunity. It has nothing to do with her attractiveness, or lack of it. If she, a married woman with a missing husband, stands helplessly next to the matrimonial bed, the likelihood is that any man who happens to be in the room with her will bear her down upon it, as if moved by a kind of cosmic sense of responsibility towards her, rather than by any base or disagreeable opportunism. She is comforted by the knowledge.
In the meantime Victor’s sense of guilt towards her that her bills and the mortgage are promptly paid, and the housekeeping money is almost double what it was when he was home; nor is she any longer obliged to show him the household accounts weekly, and account for missing pennies. She no longer has to shop and cook for his evening meal; she no longer has to entertain friends she does not like, or wash up after them.
Wendy is companionable and easy. Weeds over-run the garden; dust collects in the house; the milkman has to beg her for the bottles back; she sleeps well, able to stretch over into Victor’s side of the bed; she looks younger and prettier than she ever did. Her thoughts, her habits, her child, her bed, her home; they are all her own.
