by Weldon, Fay
Judith was a local girl, nearly thirty, unmarried. Her breath was bad: no one else cared to employ her. Black haired, black browed, black chinned, broad of face, and body: slurred of speech, coarse of hand, and sullen. That, at least, was how Lucy saw her. Pale, delicate Lucy. Judith received fifteen shillings a week, paid through Butt and Sons, solicitors. She affected a marked dislike of men, but seemed to attract sexual violence. She was propositioned by workmen, molested by strangers, became quite used to the pad-pad of unknown feet behind her, and carried a heavy handbag, which she would swing skilfully as a hand or arm appeared.
At first Henry felt quite ill at ease, obliged to eat with Judith in the kitchen. There was little conversation. But the food in the kitchen turned out to be better than that served in the dining-room. Judith would fill his own deep plate and her own from the soup tureen, place the plates carefully on the Aga stove to keep warm, then, after filling two jamjars for taking home later, would hold the tureen under the cold tap to top up the level, and take it into the dining-room. He said nothing to Lucy about this practice. Why should he? His loyalties were to Judith now; below stairs, not upstairs.
The vicar came to enquire why the girls were not attending school. Lucy, watching him come up the drive, saw him as nemesis, and greeted him with flat despair in her heart. She gave him sherry. He was a youngish man, clearly from the lower middle classes. Vicars used to be the younger sons of the landed gentry. Not what she expected.
‘The girls seem so young,’ she fluted, ladylike, wild-eyed. ‘And there’s such a lot of paper-work,’ she added, her tone altogether more sane, so, being a shrewd fellow, he took his cue from that. ‘Paper-work can be very tiresome,’ said the vicar, ‘especially for a widow like yourself.’ He was a member of the golf-course, at special rates, since he could not play on Sundays, and one of the few acquainted with Lucy – through her earlier outings with the children to the Sunday School – and her circumstances. He had assumed Benjamin had abandoned a wife: now, it seemed, he had merely left a mistress: and who was to say whose the children were, since a woman who’ll live with one man, unmarried, will sleep with another.
The Reverend Allbright nevertheless, good Christian that he was, accorded Lucy a way out. Widow, he’d said, thereby welcoming her back into the fold, the community, the Mothers’ Union. Her children would now be reckoned unfortunate, but not tainted, which was a considerable improvement.
‘If you like,’ said the vicar, ‘to hand the childrens’ birth certificates over to me, I’ll get them registered at the school. You wish them to be called Duveen?’
‘Of course.’ She paled. What did he know?
‘Sometimes widows like to revert to their maiden names,’ he said, lying through his teeth. ‘They feel they once again have the shelter of their father’s name. But you prefer to keep your husband’s name alive, I see, in them. You are a brave little woman, Mrs Duveen. I admire you and my heart goes out to you.’
And so he did, and so it did, though quite why he could not have said. His own wife, Margot, was a brisk, noble and simple woman, and their sex-life polite, simple and straightforward, a weekly event, with the lights out, occurring mostly on a Friday night. Saturday night, they both silently concurred, might leave the Reverend Allbright too tired for Sunday sermons, and certainly too much connected with the flesh, too little to the spirit. The Reverend and Mrs Allbright made a sharp division between the two, assuming that the flesh existed as a trial to the spirit: and since only he enjoyed it – and thought perhaps he shouldn’t – and she put up with it, for kindness and custom’s sake, they may well have assumed right. His strength and will were sapped, his vital juices drained away, when he succumbed to his sexual urges. And his wife could not recover from her sense of incongruity: the man in white dog-collar and black suit, whom she had married, thus translated to pink, pounding flesh and blood. Nor, come to that, could he. Still, God had devised this means of perpetuating the race and cementing the sacrament of marriage. God said do it, so they did.
Margot Allbright was obliged to cheat, too: pushing a piece of sponge soaked in vinegar up her vagina, for fear of conceiving a fifth child. Cheating herself, God, her husband, she did it, but scarcely bore to think about it. Was sex really necessary?
Now, the Reverend Allbright, surveying the sudden softening of Lucy’s sharp little face and the gratitude dawning in her eyes, caught a glimpse of other possibilities: of the exercise of sexual power, of mastery and masochism, of an entirely different scale of sexual existence than the one he was accustomed to, lapping and overlapping emotional entanglement and physical intertwinings; and even thought wildly for a moment or so of stepping to embrace his unfortunate parishioner, and seeing what would happen next –
But he did not. The moment passed.
‘I hope to see you at the church soon,’ said the Reverend Allbright. ‘I know your husband was of the Jewish faith, but I imagine you will want your daughters brought up as Christians?’
‘Of course,’ said Lucy, perfectly prepared to abandon King David in the interests of respectability.
The vicar enrolled the girls at the nearest Church of England school, which was a good two miles away, and not the secular school at the end of the road.
Lucy took the girls to church and saw that they went to Sunday School, became a member of the Mothers’ Union, voted for the expulsion of a young farmer’s wife, mother of three, who was discovered on the desertion of her husband to have been bigamously married, although not to her knowledge at the time. Exonerating circumstances, no doubt, but not powerful enough to wipe out sin. A state of sin, especially in sexual matters, could be brought about without the sinner’s knowledge. One had to be careful. Curtains must be closed lest the sun in its brilliance fade the velvet cushions. Food must be bland in case it agitated the senses: must not be too appetising, in case gluttony, that deadly sin, eroded the spirit. Servants must not be paid too much, in case they got above themselves, forgot their place. Visitors must be discouraged, in case they found out.
Found out what? Lucy could scarcely remember. She, a decent widow, with family solicitors, administering her interests, could scarcely have a guilty secret. Could she? No, she was surely too finely attuned to the lack of respectability in others: she was no hypocrite. Benjamin had said so.
‘Wash the windows, Henry,’ she’d say. He’d wash them. She’d inspect the blemishes and complain. He’d do them again. Where had Henry come from? She began to believe he was some kind of poor relative, wounded in the war, now having to be looked after, out of charity. The odd-job man, with his hobby, his photography. His little shop on the sea-front. No, not a trade.
A hobby.
The money that Henry brought home from his now prosperous business kept the household going. He slept, occasionally, with Judith; it was both their revenge upon Lucy, rather than any overwhelming desire on his part, or hers.
‘I’m not a servant: not, not, not,’ he’d say, like a naughty child, keeping time, as in some clapping street game, with his strokes inside Judith; or vaguely inside; or at any rate round and about.
‘Who does she think she is?’ Judith would respond, staring up at him, unmoved. ‘Who’s she to give herself airs? She’s nobody. Rubbish!’
She was like some piece of wood, he thought, which ought to sprout with leafy branches in the spring, but wouldn’t. Obstinate. He was reassured by her placidity, her lack of response. He could do what he liked: if he was weak, or barely roused, she did not seem to mind. He would rub himself against her, gaining such pleasure as he could: his excitement, like hers, springing from his indignation with Lucy, not from Judith’s hot stolid body. Active women frightened him. He’d been with a French girl once, on leave. She’d seemed to explode, as a man might. It had frightened him; sudden explosions in the trenches killed and maimed; explosions in the head, in the loins – all much of a muchness – were surely something to be feared.
‘Anyway, she’s a Jew,’ said Judith. ‘Dirty Jews. Ever
ything’s their fault.’
There was a general feeling about, though seldom so vehemently expressed, that all social evils were the fault of the Jews. Unemployment, low wages, bad housing, depression – both national and personal – it was all due to the Jews. Few had actually ever met one: but they had heard.
Lucy was quite relieved that Benjamin was dead, and that Butt and Sons, Solicitors, had such a Christian name.
‘What did Father die of?’ Praxis asked Hypatia, presently.
‘Ask mother,’ said Hypatia, safe these days in the knowledge that Praxis would not. Nor did she.
Praxis liked school. The building was Gothic Victorian; it smelt of cabbage, stale urine, and hot damp bodies. She loved to play and giggle and compete. The teachers were kind and complimentary. No one hid anything. Everything was open, mucky and honest. There was a separate entrance for boys and girls, and separate playgrounds, but they shared lessons. Boys sat on the side nearest the door, girls nearest the wall. It was customary. Hypatia liked school less. She was more responsive than Praxis to her mother’s inference that the family was different, raised above the common herd. Though there were no more references to King David, Lucy found figures to be proud of in her own family background: a titled great-aunt, a great-great-uncle who had invented the steam turbine. She wrote to her mother: but her mother did not reply. Why? Had she died, gone away, moved house? Lucy did not know. Presently it seemed to her that she was an orphan, and always had been.
‘My poor mother,’ she’d sometimes say. ‘My poor dead mother.’
Praxis got nits in her hair. Lucy had hysterics. Praxis’ hair was cut very short and she went to school in a scarf, along with half a dozen others. Dirty children. Lucy wrote to Butt and Sons asking if the girls could have their fees paid at a private school. No, said the Butts, conscious of their duty to the Duveen family finances, now much depleted. Much of the family money had to go towards the rescuing of obscure cousins from Hitler’s Germany.
Lucy next wrote to Butt and Sons asking whether the girls’ secondary education could not, perhaps, be paid for by their father’s family.
No, replied Butt Senior, and was the children’s mother aware that when the younger reached sixteen, all support and maintenance would stop? In the meantime, had she considered enrolling her daughters in a state sponsored school for domestic training? The girls must expect to support themselves, and in these days of the servant problem, no girl with such a training need go short of a job.
The letter, as were all letters from Butt and Sons, was addressed to Miss Parker. ‘It’s because I’m a widow,’ she explained to the postman: ‘They want to save my feelings.’ She believed it, but he did not.
Lucy had not been aware that maintenance could stop. She had envisaged it continuing for ever. She asked Henry back to the dining-room for meals, and he accepted her invitation. Judith crashed and banged about the house: Lucy could not understand why.
Hypatia won a scholarship to the grammar school; Lucy was triumphant and wrote to tell Butt and Sons of her triumph. Would they, she added, pass on the good news to the Duveen family?
‘She’s not going to be a nuisance, I hope,’ said Senior Butt to Junior Butt, holding the scented scrawl some distance from himself the better to focus. Lucy had in fact rewritten the letter seven times in order to get grammar, spelling and presentation correct.
‘You went too far,’ said the younger Butt, ‘in your earlier letter. I told you she’d respond badly to pressure. She’s a real hard egg. She tried to trap the son into marriage, and now that’s well and truly failed, and young Benjamin is out of her clutches, she’s going to try blackmailing his unfortunate family.’
‘She does have his two children,’ demurred the elder Butt.
‘That’s her story,’ said Butt Junior. ‘How could one ever be sure?’
Nevertheless Butt Senior wrote back to Lucy saying how pleased he was to hear of Hypatia’s success; hoping that Praxis might follow suit: and adding that the matters of rent and allowance and maintenance could be deferred until Praxis’ eighteenth birthday and possibly even longer.
Lucy felt bolder and returned Henry to the kitchen. The coarse hair of his nostrils repelled her: so did the pallid trembling of his hands. She was glad when he went.
On the first day at the girls’ grammar school the form mistress read out the register, while the girls murmured their presence. ‘Hilda Duveen,’ she said.
Silence.
‘When I say your name, Hilda,’ said the form mistress to Hypatia, ‘you say present. Shall we try again? Hilda Duveen?’
‘Present,’ said Hypatia. It was her mother’s doing. Lucy had never liked her children’s names, and the Reverend Allbright had undertaken to talk to the grammar school head-mistress about changing them. The news had been late in reaching Hypatia, that was all. When it was Praxis’ turn to move on to the grammar school she found that her name was now Patricia.
6
We can’t be strong all the time; I comfort myself with that notion. We can’t stick to our principles, act as we ought, fight for our causes, not non-stop, all our lives. We must surely be prepared to take shifts in our fight for Utopia, or failing that, to hand over entirely the burden of our conscience to those who are younger, fresher and less afflicted by experience than ourselves. Then, our task done, we can sink back with a clear conscience into selfishness and apathy. Our righteousness wears out long before our bodies do.
I ought to rejoice for the girl who stood upon my toe in the bus. I ought to be glad, for her beauty, her freedom, her dignity, her pride. But I don’t; I’m not. She has injured me, and I can see no further than that: my eyes are dimming with age. I ought to be thankful, and take some credit myself, for the fact that she will never have to live in such a prison of shame and hypocrisy as the one in which my mother found herself. Poor mother. Of course she should have struggled. My father’s people in Germany should have struggled too. But she did not, as they did not. We see the world as we are taught to see it, not how it is. Our vision since has widened. And of course she should have kept her misery to herself, not handed it on to her children. For a time I hated her for her weakness, until I saw what I did to my children through my strength. Then I forgave her.
I am not strong at the moment. If the social worker comes knocking at my door I shall certainly let her in. I cannot hobble as far as the cooker to make so much as cup of tea. I cannot, worse, reach the drawer which contains the pain-killers. Am I Praxis or Patricia? Patricia, without a doubt. Pat, for short, for convenience. Everyone’s convenience. A dismissable, neutral name, jolly at best, unerotic at worst. Others seem quite happy with it, but then they were born with it. I wasn’t. The name a vengeful, if practical, mother would choose for a sensible child, the better to give orders to. Pat, fetch my bag, clear the table, weed the garden. Pat, do your homework, find Hilda’s hairgrips. Poor hateful Hilda.
I called myself Pat in Holloway Prison. The social worker calls me Pat. She feels she has the right to be familiar. She does not regard me as a criminal: I wish she did. She sees me as someone half-mad, who couldn’t cope and covered up her inadequacy by what she calls an ad hoc justification. She calls me Pat because she pities me, and her nature and training will not allow her to condemn me. To accept that I acted out of principle, and not because it was expedient, would terrify her: would open up questions and considerations she is frankly too busy doing good to consider.
I wish she would come. She could make the tea. Her name is Myra Jones. She is half my age: she has the warm light of virtue in her eye. She would never have killed as I did, coldly, gritting my teeth. She would have been positive and sensible, and put the poor little half-witted thing into a home, and then set about running the home, if it didn’t suit her vision of what a home for the mentally handicapped should be. Would she herself have spooned slops into the adult mouth, or cleaned off the adult nappies? Yes, she would, she could, from sheer insufficiency of imagination. If she had to. Only if s
he had to, and until she could persuade or train some other slightly more high-grade half-wit to do it. I have encountered some of these latter half-wits, on the staff of mental homes, or shelters or protected communities – whatever the latest name is for these repositories for human distress: they love to be revenged upon their charges: they tease the mumbling and the twitching and the incontinent as they themselves are teased and humiliated in the outside world. No, the seed of King David, however distorted and debased, was not to end at the mercy of such as these. Obliteration was better.
Last time Myra Jones called, I remember, I would not let her in. I did not want her poking and prying. There is something of my mother in me.
My mother, in the acuteness of her distress after my father left her, spent her nights for a time with Henry Whitechapel. Or so he told me later, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. There was certainly no point in asking her. Mother would have denied it and believed her denial, whether she had or whether she hadn’t. At a time when women’s instincts were so much at a variance with the rules of society, such localised amnesias were only to be expected. But was this episode out of character? Was my mother, from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, living out a part that did not suit her at all? I believe the latter. I concur with the vicar, the Reverend Allbright, and the younger Butt, who both avowed that a woman who’d sleep with one man outside marriage, would sleep with another. I have friends who married as virgins and only made love with their husbands all their lives, and wouldn’t want it any other way. They seem the happiest with their lot in life. I wish it were not so, but it is. My mother tried to attain the happiness of the sexually exclusive, but had left it too late. She was polluted. To lose one’s virginity is not – as the toe-trampler on the bus would no doubt have it – an insignificant event. It is tremendous, momentous, and sets the pattern for an entire sexual life to come. I even think, sometimes, that that narrow hypocritical society was right, and that Hypatia and myself had no right to be alive: and had better have remained the outcasts we were born.
