by Weldon, Fay
“Mother, I don’t believe you are a stupid woman. You went to college to get a degree. I think it is marriage that has made you stupid. You have lived your life through your husband. You have dedicated yourself to him, and given the scraps to me, and there is nothing left of you, nothing, except a parrot wittering phrases, and when I go, when I do go, you won’t have him, because when I go, Father goes. I feel it. And Val says so.”
“Hermes,” I said, “surely it’s time you left home.”
“Oh yes, that’s right,” she cried out in her bitterness. “Turn me out in the last year of my finals! It’s because I’m a lesbian! Val says lesbians must expect opposition, driven from pillar to post.”
“Oh, do move your books, Hermes,” I said, “and not a word to your father about being a lesbian until Mrs Thatcher has sorted out the economy a little.”
‘Of course I only said that to annoy her, and I shouldn’t, but life can get very boring.
‘Hermes screamed and threw a book, which caught the pressure cooker and spilt the stew and knocked the gravy all over the floor just as Alan came into the room, back from work.
“Do run along, Hermes,” I said, and she did, and Alan raised his eyebrows at the mess and I said I was sorry things were so behind today, Hermes was being difficult, we could no longer blame it on adolescence but perhaps she was feeling the pressure of exams and Alan said where’s the whisky and before I remembered I said in the fridge and got a lecture about whisky being served at room temperature, so I offered him gin and then said sorry again, because we’d run out of mixers, and he said what did I do all day, darling, and I said what I really wanted to do was to get out of this: start a new life: take out a second mortgage and get myself qualified, and he went into his set piece about my being a) too old to start anew and b) too loveably muddle-headed to cope outside the home.
“Darling,” he said, “if you’d ever been out to work you wouldn’t be talking like this. It is one long humiliation and curtailment of human rights.”
“Darling,” he went on, “you’d have to pay a housekeeper to do your work; they get paid more these days than office workers. We’d be running at a loss.”
“Darling,” I remember him saying, “had you thought about tax? I’d have to pay more if you went out to work. I would really resent that.”
“Darling,” he then said, “you’re a traditional woman and that’s the way I like it, even if you do put the whisky in the fridge.”
‘And I gave up and told him, unwisely, about Hermes and the fact that Val was female, whom we had assumed to be male.
“Well,” said Alan, “these things can be nipped in the bud. One can take steps.”
“But sometimes,” I said, knowing Alan, “by taking steps to make matters better, one makes them worse.”
“Darling,” he said, “trust me to know what I’m doing,” and I felt a sudden twinge of backache.
‘I remember I used to get quite bad backache, in those days. I took it to the doctor, on occasion, who would always say, what did I expect, at my time of life, so I’d take it home again, with a prescription for Valium. I was going to be a doctor once,’ says Esther to Mr Khan, ‘but my father said it was a waste of the nation’s resources, not to mention his, since I’d only get married and have children. He was quite right, as it turned out. That’s what I did. Have you noticed, Mr Khan, how many women there always are in doctors’ surgeries, and how few men?’
‘That may be,’ says Mr Khan smugly, ‘why it’s women who outlive men.’
While Esther tells Mr Khan such sections of her life story as she feels to be relevant to her grievances, Freddo and Hermes drink herbal tea in the canteen. Hermes is cold and sulky but Freddo barely notices.
‘I’d rather drink horse-piss,’ says Freddo, sipping a fine yarrow concoction.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Hermes.
‘Some people do,’ he assures her. ‘It cures rheumatism.’ And he tells her she is old-fashioned, and she says she isn’t interested in his opinion of her, and he says she’d better be, because he’ll be her stepdaddy soon enough, at which Hermes begins to weep gently into her camomile tea.
‘Why can’t my parents’ generation keep itself to itself?’ she moans. ‘Why does it have to come banging back into ours? Face-lifts for him, young lovers for her! At least my grandmother had the decency to grow old from a comparatively early age.’
‘Och, my darling,’ he says, and slips a consoling arm around her waist, ‘sure in mythology it happens all the time. First the mother, then the daughter!’
But she’s too lost in her own woes to feel the pressure of his hand or catch the tenor of his thoughts, and begins to repeat over and over:
‘It’s all my fault.’
‘It was all Hermes’ fault,’ Alan is saying to Pony, at that very moment, and he tells her how he had first gone calling on Val, to nip in the bud any possible undesirable relationship his daughter might make. He felt in those days that he was not a sufficiently attentive father and that the least he could do was take definitive action from time to time. Esther, at Alan’s command, has searched for and found Val’s address amongst Hermes’ papers. And so Alan had gone off to visit after work, grey-suited and brief-cased, and bolstered by a sense of being altogether on the right side of society. A gaggle of young persons on roller-skates nearly knocked him down: Val lived in a racy and expensive part of town. Her front door was chequered in silver and green. He found that strange and sinister. When Val opened the door to him he was taken aback. He had expected some tough-jawed young woman in denims, but found instead a shimmery young woman dressed in green silk with almond eyes set widely apart, and short, shiny fair hair: she was what he thought women should be and dismissed at once any notion that the friendship between her and Hermes was suspect. How could it be? He was irritated with Esther for having suggested it in the first place. How now was he to explain his presence? “Well?” Her voice was husky: it turned his heart over.
“I’m Hermes’ father.” It was all he could think of to say.
“How rare,” she said, “for a man to define himself in relation to a woman. And how welcome! Do come in.”
And she stepped to one side and he stepped past her, and caught a delicate whiff of her perfume, or soap, or shampoo, or something ridiculous, as he went by. Esther always used medicated soaps and shampoo.
‘And then? And then?’ asks Pony, for Alan’s voice falters and is still.
‘What do you think?’ asks Alan, his nostrils dilating a little, caught in the sadness and wonder of amazing times, gone by.
‘Of course, I know you’re very attractive, but someone like that, your daughter’s age – why would she want to?’ asks Pony.
‘You have not seen me at my best,’ says Alan stiffly, speaking out from beneath his bandages, ‘or you wouldn’t ask. Why you and Mr Khan, come to that?’
Mr Khan reclines on a sofa in his office. He is telling Esther about Pony.
‘I love the little thing,’ says Mr Khan. ‘I tell you this because I want you to know that I too am tempted, I too am human. I too am fed up with marriage. I am in no position to judge others. Of course, I love my wife as well as Pony.’
‘Of course—’
‘And I shan’t leave her. How can I? She has never deserved it.’
But Esther isn’t listening.
‘I blame Hermes,’ she says. ‘I really do. If she hadn’t been so silly, or if I hadn’t mentioned her coming out to Alan – girls these days come out into lesbianism as they used to come out into High Society – none of it would ever have happened.’
‘It should never have happened,’ says Alan, regaining his composure, ‘but it did.’ And he tells Pony in rather more detail how it had all come about. How Val had lain back on embroidered cushions, while Alan paced and apologised. Shimmering and glimmering up at him: pale limbs against luscious fabrics.
“Of course it all sounds absurd now I’m here,” he’d said. “How could you possibly
be a bad influence on Hermes? If she were to grow up even remotely like you—”
“We’re the same age, Alan.”
“Yes, but you’re so original.”
She’d seemed surprised.
“Perhaps you’re accustomed to the company of very unoriginal people?”
“You find me suburban?” He’d considered himself, and sipped his whisky sour. “I daresay you’re right. The modern equivalent of the Yeoman of England. Sutton Man! I’m a senior executive in a big company, as it happens. International. Of course the UK operation is a fairly minor division of the whole, but more funds are being diverted here from the States and I have a reasonable prospect of going on the Board.”
“You don’t have to give me your qualifications,” she’d remarked. He was confused. Why was she lying back amongst cushions; what did she mean by it? Twenty years ago it would have been an open invitation for him to throw himself upon her, but who was to say what the signals were, these days? Perhaps she displayed the length of leg, the curve of the breast, the better to cry rape? Or perhaps it was just how she always welcomed guests: reclining on a low sofa, laughing and languorous. And how now was he to construe her last remark?
“I think you are the most beautiful, extraordinary girl I’ve ever seen in my life,” he’d said, giving up.
And she’d considered this, and stopped laughing, and become intense.
“Am I supposed to be flattered, or honoured, or both?”
“I was merely telling you what I thought,” said Alan, and then feeling that perhaps in her circles ‘thought’ was not an okay word, amended it to ‘felt’.
“No,” said Val, “you weren’t. You were expecting me to be grateful for your good opinion of me: which is really only a prelude to saying you want to go to bed with me, now, and go home to your wife after a couple of hours and hope to God I’ll forget the whole business. And if I telephone you at your office your secretary will say you’re out, but you’ll ring back after your meeting, which you won’t: and you can rely on me not to ring you at home because on the whole girls like me – or the kind of girl you think I am – are frightened of wives, and feel guilty about sleeping with married men, which is, after all, like sleeping with father to annoy mother.”
How could she read his mind? He’d wanted to leave. And even as he prepared to go, she’d stretched, cat-like, and said, “But certainly, if it’s what you want, I’ll go to bed with you. I just think you ought to be more honest.” That frightened him.
“I think I’d better go.”
She did not make the expected move to detain him. She suggested he give her regards to his wife, whom she had heard so much about from Hermes.
“You are more like a piranha-fish than a woman,” he’d complained. How could the mind be so sharp and wounding while the body so warm and yielding? “Thank God I am happily married!”
“Then you just go home to it,” she’d said, as if to a naughty child. He’d shuffled and shivered. He’d said he’d ring her in the morning, when she was feeling better, and started again for the door, and changed his mind, and said:
“It’s such a relief, you’ve no idea, finding a woman who can look after herself.”
She’d looked up at him with darkening, receptive eyes, no longer laughing, or mocking, or hurting, and he’d said, surprising himself, for during his ins and outs with various secretaries and colleagues’ wives over the years, he’d never said it, keeping at least some loyalty to Esther, “I love you.” He amended it to, “I think I could love you,” at once, but nevertheless it was said.
Alan falls silent again. Pony stares at him in alarm. There are tears in his eyes.
‘You mustn’t let your mind dwell on unpleasant things,’ she says.
His hand goes to his neck, remembering Val’s small white fingers, and how they unknotted his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. Her green silk whatever it was, was no hindrance to passion. There seemed, with Val, so little difference between dressed and undressed. Esther was always somehow embattled behind her clothes.
‘It’s not unpleasant,’ he says. ‘It’s the difference between then and now that’s painful, that’s all.’
Now Mr Khan holds Esther’s hand in his and tells her his troubles.
‘My wife works,’ he says. ‘She is a brilliant brain surgeon. She saves a dozen lives a week. Some of course come out as vegetables, but death’s the alternative, and her vegetation rate, as we call it, is lower than anyone’s. She has right on her side: all I have is money, but rightness weighs heavier in the scales of life. Our home runs like clockwork. We have a housekeeper and a timetable pinned on the wall: we take turns fetching and delivering the children: dancing lessons, fencing, music: we fit everything in. Clockwork! Why then do I love Pony, who is nothing, not even a very good nurse? I will tell you. Because she worships me, she adores me, she doesn’t understand me. But how can I leave my wife? It would destroy her.’
Esther looks down with some satisfaction at her lean, made-over, well-loved self, and says,
‘It might be the making of her.’
But he’ll have none of that.
‘She is made already,’ he says. ‘That’s what I can’t stand. Our love-life is fantastic, fantastic. Pony lacks imagination, not to mention stamina. But it’s Pony I want. I need her inefficiency. Look at me! My life is running out!’
‘All our lives are running out,’ says Esther sadly, ‘but Alan used to be preoccupied with how much faster my life was running out than his. He thought it justified his horrid little affairs.’
‘Affairs are not necessarily horrid,’ protests Mr Khan. ‘Sometimes they are beautiful, beautiful! I see Pony’s little dancing legs beneath her crisp white nurse’s skirt, and my heart turns over! I, Mr Khan, at whose frown the whole department of cosmetic surgery trembles! That this little creature, this little nurse, should wrap me around her little fingers – is not there wonder, and hope and amazement in this?’
‘I became hopelessly entangled in her web,’ says Alan to Pony. ‘She was Eve and she held out the apple of knowledge to me, and I ate of it, and was cast out for ever.’
They lay together, Alan and Val, in her satin bed. It was afternoon, the best time for stolen trysts. All passion spent, Alan lay on his elbow and gazed down at her perfect face, the sweep of her long lashes, the curl of hair beneath the ear. Her skin was dewy.
“You have everything before you,” he said to her, “it gives you a special quality. Youth, future, intelligence, hope: all shine through you!”
Her large eyes shot open.
“Alan,” she observed, “you are a terrible lover.”
He was taken aback. He thought he had done well enough. Was this what the new woman said to men, at such times?
“I beg your pardon?”
“You have no idea at all,” she said, “how to go about it.”
“No one else has ever complained.” He was haughty.
“I daresay not,” she said. “But then perhaps you only encounter people with no standards.”
Alan rose and dressed himself, vowing never to return.
“It seems the least you can do for your wife,” said Val, “when you do find time for her, is to afford her some small sexual satisfaction. I am more and more on your wife’s side. I am really thinking of giving up men altogether. At least women know what to do, and when, and how.”
“Good God,” said Alan, looking for his tie, “sex between men and women is an expression of love. It is purely instinctive. One does, after all, what comes naturally.”
“No,” said Val, “one does not. Sex is an acquired skill. Some have a natural talent for it, of course, the way some people are born able to draw beautifully, but application and training is still required. And you’ve simply never bothered.”
Alan had taken quite considerable offence.
“I’m going now, Val,” he said, “and I’m not coming back. You’ve gone too far. A man turns to a woman for comfort, reassurance, and a sense of completen
ess.”
“Surely,” said Val, “a man would turn to his mother for that. A lover offers something different.”
“I don’t like the way you use the word lover. Men are lovers, women are loved.”
Val sat up, bare breasts poised above the oyster silk.
She seemed surprised.
“I am your lover. You are mine. We are equal.”
At that he turned back to her, and sank back upon the bed: his resolution had failed. He could not do without her. She seemed neither gratified, nor disappointed, whether he stayed or whether he went. It occurred to him that she had no expectations and, having none, found the world immeasurably interesting. He thought he wanted to be like her, to divest himself of the boring habits of established thought: the little spats of righteousness and self-justification from which he suffered. He wanted to be born again, body and soul.
“Aren’t you going?” she asked.
“No. I find it too interesting. I want to change. I want to join your new world.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, if you’re going to stay, if we’re to continue this relationship, you’re going to have to learn to do better.”
“But you’ll teach me?”
“I haven’t time,” she said. She was taking exams in Design at the RCA. She rose and drank some spring water from a bottle and dug her sharp teeth into a red apple, naked as she was.
“I think you’d better buy a manual.”
And he lay on her bed, Sutton Man in a good grey suit and pale blue tie, and wondered what had hit him.
‘Hermes tried to tell me about Alan and Val,’ Esther is saying to Mr Khan, ‘but I didn’t want to listen. I was frightened. I knew everything was changing. I remember one evening in particular, Hermes was going berserk because I was darning socks and I was trying to explain to her how important it is that a man’s feet should be comfortable, and how I knew it was old-fashioned, but I liked doing it – it’s really quite a skill – and how it seemed wrong to me, simply to throw things away and start again, and how if she loved a man she’d know what I meant.
