by Weldon, Fay
‘Yes,’ said Barbara and Bernadette. ‘He goes round to see Mum quite a lot. We didn’t like to tell you because we didn’t want to upset you.
‘Really,’ they said, ‘the whole thing was a plot to get rid of us. The thing is, neither of them can stand us.’ (Barbara and Bernadette went to one of the large new comprehensive schools, where there were pupil-counsellors, who could explain everything and anything, and were never lost for words.)
Enid screamed and wept all through her labour, not just from pain. They’d never known a noisier mother, they said: and she’d been so quiet and elegant and self-controlled throughout her pregnancy.
Enid gave birth to a little girl. Now in the Great War, the birth of a girl was, understandably, and unlike now, cause for commiseration rather than rejoicing. Nevertheless, Enid rejoiced. And in so doing, abandoned a battle which was really none of her making; she laid down her arms: she kissed her mother and Helene when they came to visit her, clasped her baby and admitted weakness and distress to Barbara and Bernadette, who actually then seemed quite to like her.
Walter Walther did not come home. He stayed with Rosanne. Enid, Barbara and Bernadette lived in the same house, shared suspender belts, shampoo and boyfriends, and looked after baby Belinda. Walter and Rosanne visited, sheepishly, from time to time, and sent money. Enid went back to college and took a degree in psychology, and was later to earn a good living as a research scientist.
Later still she was to become something of a propagandist in the new cold war against men; she wore jeans and a donkey jacket and walked round linked arm-in-arm with women. But that was, perhaps, hardly surprising, so treacherous had the old male allies turned out to be. All the same, yesterday’s enemy, tomorrow’s friend! Who is to say what will happen next?
Birthday!
They met on their birthday, at a party, and discovered that they had been born on the same day twenty-eight years earlier. He in the morning, she in the evening. On 19 June: Gemini – the Twins. Over the cusp and you were into Cancer, which meant you were home-loving, and Molly was if anything a little more home-loving than Mark, which was as it should be.
Molly and Mark. Two Ms. M for mother, morality, meanness, martyrdom, mine. Except for mother, M isn’t the warmest of initials, but then mother makes up for a lot. Molly craved warmth, and enclosure and security, and acknowledgment, and Mark craved approval, and love. Well, everyone craves love. To love is almost more important than to be loved. Molly thought that; Mark tended to think the other way round. But then their natal moons were in different Houses – Molly’s in the fourth, the House of the Home, Mark’s in the tenth, the House of Occupation. Molly’s moon was in Capricorn and Mark’s in Taurus. Capricorn is a rather sorrowful sign: Taurus just plain sexy.
Molly’s mother and Mark’s mother were both careful people and had kept an accurate note, in their respective diaries, of their children’s hour of birth. That was why both Molly and Mark could be so sure of their natures, as defined at any rate by astrologers, and the old-fashioned kind of astrologer, at that, who works out charts in detail and by tables – not the new-fashioned kind who uses a silicon chip computer, and disregards the moon.
The moon is a strong influence on anyone’s character, in particular anyone female, and should not be disregarded.
Molly and Mark were united in dislike of their mothers. It was their unholy bond. They had never admitted it to anyone before. Oh, but it is the worst bond of all. If you are to love your life you must love your mother. Somehow. It is the stuff from which you spring. Deny the good in that and you deny the good of everything.
Mark’s mother had grand relatives and a fluty voice and other sons who rose in the ranks of the army and the church and married nice young girls in churches full of flowers. Mark was expelled from school, failed to get to Sandhurst or even university, lived by odd carpentry jobs and married Molly, who was no one, in a Register Office full of plastic roses. Mark’s mother was there, but looked rather unhappy. Mark’s father was in Uganda, as usual.
Molly’s real father lived a Bohemian life with a famous lady artist on whose money he lived. Molly longed to be owned by them, but feared, rightly enough, that they found her boring. Nervousness in their company made her voice hard and her remarks edgy and she knew she was never at her best when she was with them. Her father and stepmother had a row on their way to her wedding, and never got there. Their rows were like that – they would stop the traffic for miles around. Molly was relieved and aggrieved, both at once. Molly longed for Mark, and money. That’s another M. Only there wasn’t much money.
Did they believe what they were saying, Mark and Molly, in those first few months, as they gazed into each other’s eyes? Did they really see themselves written in the stars? Well, why not? They felt it. Love transmuted them: the base metal of reality turned to gold around them.
Perhaps it’s better for a man and a woman in love not to be the same age? Perhaps the old tradition, that a woman marries a man a few years older than herself, so that he is not just a little older but a little wiser than she, is after all desirable? So that in every household in the land it can be perceived that the man rules, and the woman acquiesces, and that in this lies natural justice, richness, happiness and fruitfulness? They discussed this too; and then they married. Of course.
Perhaps mothers who keep diaries and don’t lose them are not the best mothers in the world? Molly’s mother was a complainer. She had been left by her first husband, Molly’s father, had had a hard time bringing up Molly by herself, without support, had married again, and still complained – with reason – for her new husband was a mean and rigorous man, and would not give a penny to a starving cat, as Molly’s mother put it.
‘Ah, but what use would a penny be to a starving cat?’ asked Mark, who did not like Molly’s mother much, in which he was at one with Molly, and they both giggled, naughtily.
Just money enough to live with a little warmth and peace and fitted carpets and curtains you could close against the world, keeping stress and anger and upset out, and love in. Not money for show – not for minks and gold taps, just money so you didn’t have to snatch and save and think about it, or work out how the electricity was to be paid, or even bother to remember when the bills fell due.
Mark liked money to spend; Mark liked money to be there, like magic. Mark believed everyone had money behind them, in securities, and before them, in legacies, and the fact that he had neither, because somehow the family fortune had been lost in Uganda, made no difference to the way he felt about money.
Molly had Jupiter in the second House, and Mark had Jupiter in the tenth House, which made money important in their lives. Molly’s Jupiter was well aspected to the moon, Mark’s badly. Molly was better with money.
They discussed all this in the first weeks of their marriage. ‘We’ve got to start as we mean to go on,’ said Molly, looking at the champagne on the bedside table. ‘And we can’t go on like this.’
Champagne went to her head, deliciously. Part of her loved parties, just as Mark did. Silken shifts and sparkling shoes and lovers’ looks across the room. It was just, perhaps, that her natal moon had gazed down from Capricorn, three-quarters full, waxing, and clouds had scudded across it and obscured its brightness.
Molly was a little taller than Mark, who was finely built and wide-eyed, like a naughty faun. Molly’s jaw was a little large and her nose a little long: she wished she had been born littler, less competent.
Her natal moon stared sideways and un-squarely at Saturn and made her practical.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said.
‘We won’t,’ he said. He loved her, his heavenly twin, his earthly mate. He wished he had been born on a bigger scale, more competent.
His natal moon went hand in hand with Venus; in collusion, as it were. It made him faithless.
‘I’ll always be true to you,’ he said. ‘This is all I require for ever and ever, amen.’ And he did not even cross his fingers as he s
poke. Then.
Well: Mark threw away the champagne bottles, found a job as a junior accounts executive in an advertising agency and took out a mortgage on a little house in the suburbs.
Molly took a part-time job as receptionist to a local dentist. The job was well beneath her capacity but about equivalent to her qualifications. Her schooling had been much disrupted, as her mother changed house and husbands, and no one at home had believed much in education. But the fact that she worked part-time enabled her to paint and polish the little house and cook Mark’s dinner when he came home from work.
Molly learned to roof, and plumb, and wire, and carpenter. Someone had to. There seemed to be so very little money. Mark was only a junior executive in his advertising agency, and earned just about enough to keep things going, and came home tired and dispirited. And in a way, having a house and a mortgage and a job and a future had been Molly’s idea, not Mark’s. Mark, she knew quite well, could have lived from hand to mouth on champagne for ever, not having a moon in Capricorn. So really, thought Molly, it was up to her to make a go of things.
‘He should do more,’ said Molly’s mother, staring at her daughter’s lime-chapped hands. Molly had been demolishing a plaster wall, breaking through the division between the two little ground-floor rooms to make one large airy one, and the plaster was old, and lime-filled, and got in her hair and on to her clothes.
It was the kind of thing Molly’s mother did say. Mark observed that Molly’s mother just didn’t like men. (Molly’s mother had Mars in Taurus, badly aspected.)
‘Mark works hard enough at the office, Mother,’ said Molly. Mark’s hands were smooth and pale and long-fingered, beautifully manicured. Molly loved them, outside and inside her body.
Molly was, increasingly, somehow workaday herself – she felt it. She read recipe books and lit candles and created an atmosphere of romance, when she could. Mark liked that. It stopped him slumping in front of the television, which was an old man’s trick, not a young one’s.
‘You can’t mean to live here for ever,’ complained Mark’s mother. ‘Supposing you had children.’
Through Mark’s mother’s eyes their street was mean and dingy, strewn with tattered papers and abandoned cars; a street no taxi-driver had ever heard of. (Mark’s mother had Jupiter in mid-heaven. She lived grandly.) But Molly loved her house: her little suburban house. Mark came home to it.
Molly was a little vague about what happened at Mark’s office. Mark put up with it for her sake; she knew that, and was grateful. And Presentation Day happened about once every three months, and entailed late nights, exhaustion and worry. It was, apparently, when a new campaign was presented to a client and was either accepted, which meant a bottle of champagne – reminiscent of other, carefree days – or rejected, which meant a stiff upper lip and a few sleepless nights, and try again. But Mark was very good.
He didn’t bring his work home, either literally or spiritually, if he could possibly help it. That was how Molly liked it. There was the world outside the curtains, which was less and less to do with her, and the world inside, which was her kingdom, with Mark its king.
The new baby had Aquarius rising, the sun in Libra, and the moon in the ninth. A happy, benign, kindly little soul. Her Saturn was in the fourth House, though, the House of the family, and badly aspected. Molly had, for the time, gone off astrology, and didn’t give the matter much thought. Nappies and gas-boilers and feeds and pram sheets are such practical things, making the stars in their courses seem irrelevant. A new mother with a new baby gets through her day as best she can. They called the baby Angela. Molly’s stepmother, the painter, must have thought it too ordinary a name, for she forgot to send a card, let alone a gift, or money. Molly thought a lot about money, these days – Mark paid a sum into the joint account every month, but he had no idea of the reality of inflation, of course. Men didn’t. And he had to look smart for work: he had to have silk ties and shirts with firm collars, and well-cut suits and hand-made shoes. Advertising was like that.
She gathered that Mark didn’t like advertising. It seemed to him vaguely immoral. He found his colleagues phoney and tricksy, and prone to stabbing each other in the back. He bought sandwiches for lunch, he told Molly, and walked in the park and thought about nature, and the craft of the woodworker, and whether it wouldn’t be possible for his little family, one day, if only they could somehow save enough money, to live in the country, naturally, as God had meant man (and woman) to live.
Well, Mark’s moon was strongly aspected in Neptune, which gave him a spiritual side to his nature. Molly’s moon made no aspect to Neptune at all.
And how were they to save? Molly managed marvellously – three Ms in a row; add Mark, and that makes four: four square corners to a safe, secure world – but money was so hard to come by. You can buy flaky soap cheap, and Molly did, but a pound of apples is a pound of apples and costs more all the time.
‘It’s the Common Market,’ said Mark, sadly. ‘The international conglomerates have done it: it’s they who’ve sent us on this helter-skelter inflationary recession. And to think I’m part of that kind of world! But what can I do?’
What, indeed? It takes money to change jobs, and a man with a house, a wife and a family can’t be irresponsible. Mark sopped up responsibility for Molly, stole light from her moon. It was marvellous. The Ms kept coming.
So did the family. Within three years there were three little girls. Angela, Anthea, and Molly’s stepmother shrieked and said, ‘No, not another A, not Amelia or Alicia or Annabel,’ so they called the third child Bernice instead.
Angela, Anthea and Bernice. Anthea’s sun was in Aries and Bernice’s was in Taurus and all three were mid-signs, born respectively on the 3rd, 7th and 5th of their months, which kept their characters distinct and unneurotic, and not cuspal. People born as sun-signs change – as were the parents Mark and Molly – can veer uneasily from one nature to another. The transition from Gemini to Cancer is not easy, Gemini being so very undomestic and Cancer so very home-based.
Mark fell in love with a girl called Stella from Market Research. She was a Virgo. ‘By name but not nature,’ as Mark said to Stella in bed. He told Molly that was what he said to her in bed, because he confessed everything to Molly; everything, after a secretary at the office, a girl called Amantha, a Sagittarian, had telephoned Molly to say Mark was having an affair with Stella. Why did Amantha make such a phone-call? Perhaps, Molly thought, because she was a Sagittarian and quick on the telephone and swift to intervene in the cause of natural justice.
Molly wept for days and Mark tried to excuse himself for still more days. Or not so much to excuse, for these things happen, but to explain. Advertising was such a strange world, with strange values, and a strange language of its own, that he always felt ill at ease in it. He could not join in with the others, yet was doomed to live with them from ten to five every day. ‘Or six, or seven, or eight, or even midnight,’ mourned Molly. ‘They work you so hard and pay you so little.’
She had forgiven him days ago. He could not forgive himself.
Their standards were not his: nor their world, as he would explain in the night hours when they lay awake, side by side. He belonged to Molly, and to Angela, Anthea and Bernice. They were real, as the world of advertising was not. It was just he had been away for the weekend at a Presentation and Stella had been there, and the hotel so bleak and unfriendly and he had missed his family so much.
‘I understand, I understand—’ said Molly. ‘Let’s just get to sleep. I have to get up at six.’
She did, too. She liked to spend her evenings with Mark, just sitting, while he recovered from his day, and that meant leaving the dinner dishes until morning: and as she also liked him to have breakfast in a tidy house with his children, clean and orderly, about him, that meant getting up at six, or even earlier. She was pleased enough to do it.
But Mark’s moon was in conjunction with Mercury, and he did not stop explaining easily, once he had started,
and in the mornings, long after the Stella episode had finished, she would be bleary-eyed and yawning.
But it had finished. Finally and for ever. Stella had moved to another agency. Sometimes the phone would ring and when Molly picked up the receiver no one answered. But why should that be Stella? These things did happen in a marriage. It had happened all the time to Molly’s mother, when living with Molly’s father. Molly resolved that her marriage would be strengthened by this assault upon its integrity, and not weakened by it.
She resolved this, not merely for her own sake but for that of Angela, Anthea and Bernice, and took care thereafter to be yet more loving, a still better wife. But the episode with Stella had clouded Molly’s happiness, dulled her eyes a little, as the clouds had dulled the moon at the time that she was born. Mark seemed as bright-eyed as ever; well, that was how it went.
Molly had two terminations. There was not really the money for more children, or for the bigger house a larger family would demand. Molly and Mark talked about vasectomy, at the time when it was fashionable, but Molly thought she could not fancy a sterile man, and Mark said he’d be only too happy with a sterile woman, so Molly was sterilised instead. The sun was in opposition to the moon that day; but the operation went well enough.
On their mutual birthday, every year, Mark took Molly out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and told her how much he loved her. She adored the extravagance, and being waited upon, and impractical food you did not even have to finish. She was shocked, year by year, to see how the cost of restaurant meals soared. So, of course, did the cost of fish fingers and baked beans which, over the years, supplemented by vitamin tablets, seemed to be the staple diet of Angela, Anthea and Bernice. But all three had Capricorn stuffed with rich and benefic planets, so their lives could be expected to get better as they got older.
