by Weldon, Fay
You should have seen Enid, when she was twelve, twisting the knife in her mother’s wounds, poking about among the lumps of the cauliflower cheese, saying: ‘Do we have to eat this? No wonder Dad left home!’ ‘Eat it up, it’s good for you,’ her mother would reply. ‘If you want something fancy go and live with your stepmother.’
And, indeed, Enid had been asked, but Enid never went. Enid would twist a knife but not deliver a mortal wound, not to her mother. Instead she took up the armoury her mother never wore, breathed on it, burnished it, sharpened its cutting edges, prepared for war herself. Long after the war was over, Enid was still fighting. She was like some mad Aussie soldier hiding out in the Malayan jungle, still looking for a foe that had years since thrown away its grenades and taken to TV assembly instead.
At sixteen Enid scanned the fashion pages and read hints on make-up and how to be an interesting person; she went weekly to the theatre and art galleries and classical music concerts and exercised every day, and not until she was eighteen did she feel properly prepared to step into the battlefield. She was intelligent, and thought it sensible enough to go to university, although she chose English literature as the subject least likely to put men off.
‘Nothing puts a man off like a clever woman,’ said Helene when Enid visited. Now warriors in the Great War thought nothing of swapping secrets. Intelligence services of warring countries, hand in glove, glove in hand! It’s always been so. Just as there’s always been trade with enemy nations, unofficially if not officially. Helene lisped out quite a few secrets to Enid: her accent tinged with all the poise and decadence of a vanished Europe. ‘My foreign wife!’ Arthur would say, proudly in his honest, northern, jovial, middle-aged voice. Arthur was the J. B. Priestley of the art world – good in spite of himself.
Oh, Patty had lost a lovely prize, Enid knew it! Her beloved father! What a victory Patty’s could have been – and yet she chose defeat. She’d chosen a bra to flatten an already flat chest. ‘What’s the point?’ she asked, when Enid said she was going off to university. Couldn’t she even see that?
Little Enid, so bright and knowledgeable and determined! So young, so ruthless – a warrior! And fortune favours the brave, the strong, the ruthless. That was the point. Enid’s professor, Walter Walther, looked at Enid in a lingering way, and Enid looked straight back. Take me! Well, not quite take me. Love me now, take me eventually.
Walter Walther was forty-eight. Enid was nineteen. Enid was studying Chaucer. Enid said in an essay that Chaucer’s Parfait Gentle Knight was no hero but a crude mercenary, and Chaucer, in his adulation, was being ironic; Walter Walther hadn’t thought of that before, and at forty-eight it is delightful to meet someone who says something you haven’t thought of before. And she was so young, and dewy, almost downy, so that if she was out in the rain the drops lay like silver balls upon her skin; and she was surprisingly knowledgeable for one so young, and knew all about music and painting, which Walter didn’t, much, and she had an interesting, rich father, if a rather dowdy, vague, distant little mother. And Enid was warm.
Oh, Enid was warm! Enid was warm against his body on stolen nights. Walter’s wife Rosanne, four years older than he, was over fifty. Rain fell off her like water off a duck’s back – her skin being oily, not downy. Enid had met Rosanne once or twice baby-sitting; or rather adolescent-sitting, for Walter and Rosanne’s two children, Barbara and Bernadette.
Rosanne didn’t stand a chance against Enid. Enid still fought the old, old war, and Rosanne had put away her weapons long ago.
‘He’s so unhappy with his wife,’ said Enid to Margot. ‘She’s such a cold unfeeling bitch. She’s only interested in her career, not in him at all, or the children.’ Margot was Enid’s friend. Margot had owl eyes and a limpid handshake and not a hope of seducing, let alone winning, a married professor. But Margot understood Enid, and was a good friend to her, and had most of the qualities Enid’s mother Patty had, and one more important one besides – self-doubt.
‘Men never leave their wives for their mistresses,’ warned Margot. It was a myth much put about, no doubt by wives, in the days of the Great War, to frighten the enemy. Enid knew better: she could tell a savage war mask from the frightened face of a foe in retreat. Enid knew Rosanne was frightened by the way she would follow Enid into the kitchen if Walter Walther was there alone, getting ice for drinks or scraping mud from the children’s shoes.
Enid was pleased. A frightened foe seldom wins. The attacker is usually victorious, even if the advantage of surprise is gone, especially if the victim is old: Rosanne was old. She’d had the children late. It wasn’t as if Walter Walther had really wanted children. He knew what kind of mother she’d make – cold.
Enid was warm. She knew how to silhouette her head against the sunlight so that her hair made a halo round her head, and then turn her face slowly so that the pure line of youth, the one that runs from ear to chin, showed to advantage. Rosanne had trouble with her back. Trouble with her back! Rosanne was a hag with one foot in the grave and with the iron bonds of matrimony would drag Walter Walther down there with her, if Walter didn’t somehow break the bonds.
And Enid knew how to behave in bed, too: always keeping something in reserve, never taking the initiative, always the pupil, never the teacher. Enid had seen the Art of Love in Rosanne’s bookshelves, and guessed her to be sexually experimental and innovatory. And she was later proved right, when Walter managed to voice one of his few actual complaints about his wife: there was, he felt, something indecent about Rosanne’s sexual prowess: something disagreeably insatiable in her desires; it made Walter, from time to humiliating time, impotent.
Otherwise, it wasn’t so much lack of love for Rosanne that Walter suffered from, as surfeit of love for Enid.
Enid exulted. And Rosanne was using worn-out old weapons: that particular stage in the war had ended long ago. The battle these days went to the innocent, not to the experienced. Modern man, Enid knew by instinct, especially those with a tendency to impotence, requires docility in bed and admiration and exultation – not excitement and exercise.
‘He’ll never leave the children,’ said Margot. ‘Men don’t.’ But Enid had been left. Enid knew very well that men did. And Barbara and Bernadette were not the most lovable of children – how could they be? With such a mother as Rosanne – a working mother who never even remembered her children’s birthdays, never baked a cake, never ironed or darned, never cleaned the oven? Rosanne was a translator with the International Cocoa Board – a genius at languages, but not at motherhood. She was cold, stringy and sour – all the things soft, warm, rounded Enid was not. Walter said so, in bed, and increasingly out of it.
‘What are you playing at?’ asked Helene, crossly. Her own attitude to the world was moderating. She was an old retired warrior, sitting in a castle she’d won by force of arms, shaking her head at the shockingness of war.
Patty now lived alone in a little council flat in Birmingham. As Enid had left home Arthur no longer paid Patty maintenance. Why should he?
‘You want Walter because Walter’s Rosanne’s,’ observed Patty to Enid one day in a rare rush of insight to the head. Patty’s doctor had started giving her oestrogen for her hot flushes, and side-effects were beginning to show. There was a geranium in a pot on Patty’s windowsill, when Enid went to break the news to her mother that Walter was finally leaving Rosanne. A geranium! Patty, who never could see the point in pot plants!
All the same, something, if only oestrogen, was now putting a sparkle in Patty’s eye, and she turned up at Walter and Enid’s wedding in a kind of velvet safari jacket which made her look almost sexy, and when Arthur crossed the room to speak to his ex-wife, she did not turn away, but actually saw the point of shaking his hand, and even laying her cheek against his, in affection and forgiveness.
Enid, in her white velvet trouser suit, saw: and a pang of almost physical pain roared through her, and for a second, just a second, looking at Walter, she saw not her great love but a
n elderly, paunchy, lecherous stranger. Even though he’d slimmed down quite remarkably during the divorce. It wasn’t surprising! Rosanne had behaved like a bitch, and it had told on them both. Nevertheless, people remarked at the wedding that they’d never seen Walter looking so well – or Enid so elegant. He’d somehow scaled down to forty, and she up to thirty. Hardly a difference at all!
Barbara and Bernadette were bridesmaids. Rosanne had been against the idea, out of envy and malice mixed. She hadn’t even been prepared to make their dresses, which Enid thought particularly spiteful. ‘I’d never have made a bridesmaid’s dress for you,’ said Patty. ‘Not to wear at your father’s wedding.’ ‘That’s altogether different,’ said Enid, hurt and confused by the way Patty was seeing the war, almost as if she, Patty, were Rosanne’s ally; more Helene’s enemy than Enid’s mother.
And then Helene upset her. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of having children,’ she said, during the reception. ‘Of course I am,’ said Enid. ‘Some men can’t stand it,’ said Helene. ‘Your father, for one. Why do you think I never had any?’ ‘Well, I’m sure he could stand me,’ said Enid, with a self-confidence she did not feel. For perhaps he just plain couldn’t? Perhaps some of the blame for his departure was Enid’s, not Patty’s. Perhaps if she’d been nicer her father would never have left? And perhaps, indeed, he wouldn’t!
Well, if we can’t be nice, we can at least try to be perfect. Enid set out on her journey through life with perfection in mind. Doing better! Oh, how neat the corners of the beds she tucked, how fresh the butter, how crisp the tablecloth! Her curtains were always fully lined, her armpits smooth and washed, never merely sprayed. Enid never let her weapons get rusty. She would do better, thank you, than Patty, or Helene, or Rosanne.
Walter Walther clearly adored his Enid and let the world know it. His colleagues half envied, half pitied him. Walter would ring Enid from the department twice a day and talk baby-talk at her. Until recently he’d talked to his daughter Barbara in just such a manner. His colleagues came to the conclusion, over many a coffee table, that now the daughter had reached puberty the father, in marrying a girl of roughly the same age, was acting out incest fantasies too terrible to acknowledge. No one mentioned the word love: for this was the new language of the post-war age. If there was to be no hate, how could there be love?
In the meantime, for Walter and Enid, there was perpetual trouble with Rosanne. She insisted at first on staying in the matrimonial home, and it took a lawsuit and some fairly sharp accountants to drive her out: presently she lived with the girls in a little council flat. Oddly enough, it was rather like Patty’s. Practical, but somehow depressing. ‘You see,’ said Enid. ‘No gift for living! Poor Walter! What a terrible life she gave him.’ In the Great War men gave women money, and women gave men life.
Barbara and Bernadette came to stay at weekends. They had their old rooms. Enid prettified them, and lined the curtains. She was a better mother to Barbara and Bernadette than Rosanne had ever been. Walter said so. Enid remembered their birthdays, and saw to their verrucas and had their hair styled. They looked at her with sullen gratitude, like slaves saved from slaughter.
Rosanne lost her job. Rosanne said – of course, it was because the responsibility of being a one-parent family and earning a living was too much for her, but Enid and Walter knew the loss of her job was just a simple matter of redundancy combined with lack of charm. Bernadette’s asthma got worse. ‘Of course the poor child’s ill,’ said Enid. ‘With such a mother!’ Enid didn’t believe in truces. She ignored white flags and went in for the kill.
Enid had a pond built in the garden and entertained Walter’s friends on Campari and readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets. They were literary people, after all, or claimed to be. ‘Couldn’t we do without the sonnets?’ said Walter.
But Enid insisted on the sonnets, and the friends drifted away. ‘It’s Rosanne’s doing,’ said Enid. ‘She’s turned them against us.’ And she twined her white, soft, serpent’s arms round his grizzly, stranger body and he believed her. His students, he noticed, seemed less respectful of him than they had been: not as if he had grown younger but they had grown older. Air came through the lecture-room windows, on a hot summer’s day, like a sigh. Well, at least he was married, playing honestly and fair, unlike his colleagues, who were for the most part hit-and-run seducers. As for Rosanne, he knew she knew how to look after herself. She always had. A man, in the Great War, usually preferred a woman who couldn’t.
‘Let’s have a baby of our own soon,’ said Enid. A baby! He hadn’t thought of that. She was his baby. Or was he hers?
‘We’re so happy,’ said Enid. ‘You and I. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks or says. We were just both a little out of step, that’s all, time-wise. God meant us for each other. Don’t you feel that?’
He queried her use of the word God, but otherwise agreed with what she said. Her words came as definite instruction from some powerful, knowledgeable source. They flowed, unsullied by doubt. He, being older, had to grope for meanings. He was too wise, and this could only diffuse his certainty, since wisdom is the acknowledgment of ignorance.
‘Of course you should have a baby, Enid,’ said Patty. ‘Why not?’ But she wasn’t really thinking. She was having an affair with a mini-cab driver, and had forgotten about Enid. ‘Your behaviour is obscene and disgusting,’ Enid shouted at her mother. ‘He’s young.’
‘What’s the point in your making all this fuss?’ asked Patty. ‘I deserve a little happiness in my life, and I’m sure you brought me precious little!’
Enid got pregnant, straight away. Walter went out and got drunk when he heard, with old friends of himself and Rosanne. Enid was so upset by this double disloyalty she went and stayed with her friend Margot for at least three days.
Margot was married and pregnant, too, and by one of Walter Walther’s students, who had spots and bad breath. They lived on their grants, and beans and cider. Nevertheless, her husband went with her to the antenatal clinic and they pored over baby books together. Walter Walther took the view, common in the Great War, that the begetting of children was something to do with the one-upmanship of woman against woman, and very little to do with the man.
‘Look, Enid,’ said Walter, a new Walter, briskly and unkindly, ‘you just get on with it by yourself.’ Arthur had left Patty to get on with it by herself, too. Her very name, Enid, had been a last-minute choice by Patty with the registrar hovering over her hospital bed, because Arthur just left it to her.
‘You can’t have everything,’ was what Helene said, when Enid murmured a complaint or two. ‘You can’t have status, money, adoration and what Margot has as well.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Enid. ‘I want everything!’
Enid saw herself on a mountain top, a million women bowing down before her, acknowledging her victory. Her foot would be heavy on the necks of those she humbled. That was how it ought to be. She pulled herself together. She knew that, in the Great War, being pregnant could make you or break you. Great prizes were to be won – the best mother, the prettiest child, the whitest white – but much was risked. The enemy could swoop down, slender-waisted and laughing and lively, and deliver any number of mortal wounds. So Enid wore her prettiest clothes, and sighed a little but never grunted when the baby lay on some pelvic nerve or other, and never let Walter suffer a moment because of what he had done to her. (In those pre-pill days men made women pregnant: women didn’t just get pregnant.)
His boiled egg and toast soldiers and freshly milled coffee and the single flower in the silver vase were always there on the breakfast table at half past eight sharp and they’d eat together, companionably. Rosanne had slopped Sugar Puffs into bowls for the family breakfast, and they’d eaten among the uncleared children’s homework and students’ essays. Slut!
Walter was protective. ‘We have to take extra special care of you,’ he’d say, helping her across roads. But he seemed a little embarrassed. Something grated: she didn’t know w
hat. They ate in rather more often than before.
Then Rosanne, who ought by rights to have been lying punch-drunk in some obscure corner of the battlefield, rose up and delivered a nasty body-blow. Barbara and Bernadette were to come to live with Enid and Walter. Rosanne couldn’t cope, in such crowded surroundings. She had a new job, and couldn’t always be rushing home for Bernadette’s asthma. Could she?
‘A new boyfriend, more like,’ said Walter, bitterly. Enid restrained from pointing out that Rosanne was an old, old woman with a bad back and hardly in the field for admirers.
Now six perfectly cooked boiled eggs on the table each morning – Bernadette and Barbara demanded two each – is twelve times as difficult to achieve as two. By the time the last one’s in, the first one’s cooked, but which one is it?
Walter looked at his bowl of Sugar Puffs one morning and said, ‘Just like old times,’ and the girls looked knowingly and giggled. They looked at Enid and her swelling tum with contempt and pity. They borrowed her clothes and her make-up. They refused to be taken to art galleries, or theatres; they refused even to play Monopoly, let alone Happy Families. They referred to their father as the Old Goat.
Sometimes she hated them. But Walter would not let her. ‘Look,’ said Walter, ‘you did come along and disrupt their lives. You owe them something, at least.’ As if it was all nothing to do with him. Which in a way it wasn’t. It was between Rosanne and Enid.
Enid locked herself out of the house one day and, though she knew the girls were inside, when she knocked they wouldn’t let her in. It was raining. Afterwards they just said they hadn’t heard. And she’d fallen and hurt her knee trying to climb in the window, and might have lost the baby. Bernadette threw a bad asthma attack and got all the attention.
Walter spent more and more time in the department. She and he hardly made love at all any more. It didn’t seem right.
Enid went into labour at eight o’clock one evening. She rang Walter Walther at the English Department where he said he was, but he wasn’t. She rang Margot and wept, and Margot said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known you cry, Enid,’ and Margot’s spotty husband said, ‘You’ll probably find him round at Rosanne’s. I wouldn’t tell you, if it wasn’t an emergency.’
