by Weldon, Fay
Sonia suggested most forcibly to Natalie that she let the children go with their father. What sort of life could Natalie offer them? What sort of future did they have in this worn-out, sold-up, clapped-out country? Not even a change of government could save it now. Too late! Drug addiction, cancer, suicide all epidemic amongst the young! At least their father had a swimming pool.
Oh, but Natalie was stubborn.
‘My children have got me,’ she said. ‘I’ll work for them. I’ll see them through.’
‘You can’t,’ said Sonia brutally. ‘There’s nothing here for the young. Look what they’ve made of us! A nation of whores and criminals. I cheated on the bus on the way up here. I got away with someone’s thrown-away ticket. I’m a criminal, you’re a whore.’
‘I prefer the word paramour,’ said Natalie, primly.
Angus came up to the flat two or three times a week. Jean knew all about it.
‘Can’t you even park your flash car discreetly?’ was all she asked. ‘Does it have to be right outside her door? Everyone knows. It’s “Oh Jean, saw your husband’s car in Wells’ market again: Oh Jean, I thought you ought to know.”’ Jean slept soundly enough on her side of the hard orthopaedic mattress, in spite of her protests. Angus thought if she lost no sleep over it he could be doing her little harm. Sex with Natalie made him want sex with Jean, but if he approached her she’d shrug him off saying he was too old and fat to be the great lover, and please not to paw her about, for God’s sake. She was tired and had work to do. Angus thought perhaps he might ask her for a divorce, but he feared her tongue if he broached the matter. He didn’t like the way Alice and Ben looked at him, either. Alice stared reproachfully with her wide blue eyes, so like her mother’s, and Ben with a steely hostility as if he, Angus, was a debtor, and Ben the creditor. And they would quite deliberately make holes in the carpet with the toes of their shoes. Luxury flats were not really suitable for children: the carpets might look thick and rich but in fact were flimsy, and the same went for the rest of the furniture. Only the bed was solid, soft and fine: just about double enough. Sometimes, they ended up on the floor; but with her stifling her laughter, her moans, for the children’s sake. One way and another, Angus agreed with me that the children ought to go, before Harry changed his mind.
‘But he’s a criminal,’ Natalie would protest. ‘And they’re all I’ve got.’
‘You’ve got me!’
‘We want to go,’ the children said. That was a shock. Ingratitude! Alice would come home crying from school, Ben would return sulky and bruised. Alice stole sweets from Woolworths (Alice, stealing!), and Ben’s homework was never marked because of the teachers’ strike.
‘I’ll never get any GCSE’s at this rate,’ he said. ‘I’ll work in a factory all my life. Well, that’s what you want! That’s your ambition for me!’
‘I don’t,’ she’d protest.
‘You do,’ he’d say, bitterly. ‘You hate me because I’m my father’s son.’
Oh yes, oh yes, Ben and Alice wanted to go all right. Here was Daddy, offering a villa on the Spanish coast, complete with swimming pool, money, sun and status – he sent them letters and photographs, and also once an appalling little note on scented paper from the beauty queen, saying she knew she could never take their mother’s place but she wanted to be their friend. And what could Natalie offer her children? The prospect of living in a holiday flat in Wells that lasted as long as their mother’s relationship with a married man, and consequent nudges and giggles at a school they hated. Of course they wanted to go. Wouldn’t you? Look at it their way. Their mother had driven their father, by her unfaithfulness, into the arms of another; had discouraged him so that his business failed; had given away the family dog; had let the family car be repossessed – and what else? Oh yes, had disgraced them by working up at the quarry, by living off the State; had made them sleep on mattresses on the floor and taken them out of a school where they were happy and put them in one where they were miserable, to be laughed at by thicks and turnip tops. No, Ben and Alice were not pleased by their mother. Some children (not all) find themselves extremely offended by parental misfortune.
The only problem to my mind was, in the end, why did Harry Harris want them? Ungrateful little brats.
In the end Harry won and the children went. Natalie let them go. They cried when they hugged her goodbye. They left from Bristol Airport. Angus drove them there in the Audi Quattro, and they kept putting down the electric windows on the way so the upholstery got spattered with rain. They knew that life was a fight, and they meant to win it: they would swim forever in their father’s swimming pool – he who knew how to enjoy himself and how to get out of debt quick. Angus spent all that Saturday night in bed with Natalie and most of Sunday too, and did not have to pretend to be just another visitor. He no longer blamed Jean for not having given him children. Natalie wept and mourned and raged a little, but in an agreeably sensuous manner. She needed comfort and he gave it to her.
Interims
And that’s how it happened that between March and mid-October Natalie lost a husband, a home and her children, and gained a flat in Wells and a lover from Eddon Gurney. That’s how it happened that, by the end of October, Natalie was earning one hundred and twenty pounds a week working on the WAEADA carnival float in the big barn adjoining the Avon Farmers’ depot. She’d struck up quite a friendship with Flora’s Bernard. She would paint and hammer and upholster and he’d filch paint remover from his shelves so she could clean her hands, and tools to make her life easier. The advantage of an organization like Avon Farmers is that they don’t account too carefully. They rake in the money without too much fuss. Bernard would bring her his worries, along with their wares. She was an older woman, but not so old he didn’t enjoy her company.
‘Do you think I should walk out of this job?’ Bernard asked Natalie one day. Her mouth was full of upholstery tacks. She was making a swan-shaped stool in white velour, on which Mrs Housewife Princess was to sit. ‘And not just wait till it happens?’
‘Why in particular?’
‘New Wonder Bio-Eater. Sounds like a soap powder but it isn’t. Mix with water, one part to twenty, allow five minutes to work. Twenty millilitres makes 250 gallons. Must be quite strong, don’t you think?’
‘They wouldn’t allow it if it wasn’t safe,’ said Natalie piously. Everything I told her about the world had just passed in and out of her head. She was doing nicely, thank you. She’d got her freedom and her youth back; she was earning well: she was having a riotous sex life and not caring one whit about her lover’s wife. She was never one to think very far beyond her own interests. ‘Bio-eaters eat antibiotics. Farmers give penicillin to sick cows. The sick cows give milk. The milk’s full of penicillin. The Milk Marketing Board tests for it. If they find any in the tanker they send it back, won’t pay for it. But with new wonder Bio-eater – in goes the milk into the tanker, in goes a spoonful of Bio-eater, and five minutes later – everyone’s happy. The cow, the farmer and the MMB.’
Natalie thought a little.
‘But mightn’t that be bad for the person who drinks the milk?’
‘Farmers don’t drink milk,’ said Bernard, ‘that’s all I know.’
‘If you don’t do this job,’ said Natalie, ‘someone else will.’
‘You mean let them get nerve poisoning,’ said Bernard, ‘not me. Take a look. Are my hands trembling?’
He held them out for her inspection, and they were indeed trembling. She took them in her own to steady them. ‘Just nerves,’ she said, and then rather hastily let his hands go. If it hadn’t been for Flora, if it hadn’t been for Angus, both reckoned they’d have gone off in the bushes together sooner or later, but neither said anything to the other about that. The sun shone, birds sang (a few), farmers came and went, and paid Bernard over the odds for his trouble, heaving the dusty sacks as he did onto their trucks, and he put off handing in his notice for another week, and Natalie sang as she hammered. That’s what
a little response from the other sex will do. Or from the same sex, come to that.
Arthur came up to look at the float, but looked at Natalie instead.
‘So, how are you doing?’ he asked. ‘You’re looking just fine. Why don’t you come by and see me some time?’
‘Angus wouldn’t like it,’ said Natalie.
‘Angus doesn’t own you,’ said Arthur.
‘Yes he does,’ said Natalie, firmly.
‘He’s married,’ said Arthur.
‘So are you,’ said Natalie.
‘That’s different,’ said Arthur. ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’
And he laughed, and she laughed, politely. Arthur went away and told Angus that Natalie would never have the float ready in time: she’d need reinforcements. He’d felt obliged to try his luck, so charming had Natalie looked, in her white, painters’ overalls, her role changed once again, no longer a deceitful wife but taken a step or so back into little-girl dependency, so that she seemed altogether new and fresh. Just as well, of course, not to tread on Angus’ toes, but life got boring, and Sandra was becoming too serious, and had taken to calling Jane at home and putting down the receiver when she answered. Natalie would never have done a thing like that.
Angus went zooming up in the Quattro to inspect the float and was concerned by its state of unreadiness.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Natalie. ‘It’ll be all right on the night.’ But he knew it wouldn’t be.
The float was ninety feet long. At one end, fifteen feet high and roughly hewn out of balsawood, but not yet painted, was the image of a kindly estate agent. He held a giant key in an outstretched hand, which would slowly rise and fall as the float moved. Over the other end loomed a noble auctioneer, whose hammer would similarly rise and fall, as its owner turned his smiling head from side to side. Standing firm enough along the edges of the float were ranged the frontages of ideal homes, but not yet completed with the expected lace curtains and pot plants. Standing behind each house was to be an ideal housewife (circa 1955) in frilly apron waving a feather duster (not yet acquired) with a happy smile. They were not yet organized. A thousand light-bulbs, not yet strung, were to burn overhead: music, not yet selected, would come from the loudspeakers. ‘Our House’ (Madness) was Natalie’s favourite, but had a satirical edge that worried WAEADA, so no decision had been made. ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ (Crosby) was another possibility with ‘Old-Fashioned Girl’ (Kitt) coming up fast on the outside. The theme of the float was to present WAEADA as an altruistic body whose only concern was good housing and happy marriages untroubled by serious debt. ‘WAEADA – the Housewife’s Friend’ was yet to be emblazoned along the side of the edifice. But the conch throne was elegantly and beautifully finished in silky white. Fluted swan’s wings curved up and over it. ‘Isn’t it lovely!’ sighed Natalie, and how could Angus be cross? He kissed the back of her neck and went off with her into the paint shop behind the barn. Bernard gritted his teeth and sold another packet of New Wonder Bio-Eater without a single twinge of conscience. ‘We’ll have to get you helpers,’ said Angus to Natalie.
Arthur had offered Flora the role of Mrs Housewife Princess: she who was to sit on the throne. She’d come up to the shop one day with rather a nice painting she’d found on the skip outside her front door, up at the rubbish tip.
‘Who, me?’ she said. ‘A housewife? You must be joking. What am I housewife to? A caravan?’
‘We’re not fussy,’ said Arthur. ‘No one will mind. You’re liked round here.’
‘I’m not even married,’ said Flora.
‘Who is, these days?’ he asked.
‘You, for one!’ she said. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘me sit on a white throne? You have to be a virgin to do that, and I’m no virgin.’
Her instinct was right. Only virgins should sit on white thrones, and even then it’s tricky. In the early days of the carnival they’d like as not burn their chosen virgin to death. At first on purpose – later on by accident on purpose. That was the point of the event. Burn a virgin, fire a barn, drown a witch. Clear old scores and start afresh! What do you think the carnival is about? Fun and games? Oh, no.
‘We can do without a virgin,’ said Arthur, taking her pretty white hand. ‘We can’t do without you!’
‘You give me back my hand,’ said Flora. She was looking particularly pretty that day. She had gold sparkle in her hair and silver dust on her smooth cheeks, and wore one of Bernard’s leather jackets over a shabby suede miniskirt, and high, though broken, stiletto heels. He feared for his floor.
‘You just give me a proper price for my painting,’ she said. ‘That’s all you’re here to do. You leave all that other to younger, sillier folk than you.’
He did not take offence. He liked Flora. He looked a second time at the canvas – maple framed, thick with grime but with quite a nice flower painting lurking beneath, and saw that it was better than he’d at first assumed. He thought it might even be worth putting into auction. He offered her a tenner.
‘Bernard says,’ observed Flora, ‘that if you get offered a tenner it’s probably worth five hundred. If you get offered between two and five, then it’s worth about twenty.’
‘Bernard doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ said Arthur, but Bernard did. The more you offered, that was the trouble, the more the public thought you were cheating them, and the more likely you were to be doing just that.
‘A tenner,’ he repeated, ‘and I’m doing you a favour.’
‘It’s a really nice picture,’ she said. ‘I know it is, and if there was room in the caravan I’d hang it up.’ He believed she would, and it endeared her to him, even more than her long slightly bowed legs and her wide eyes and her glitter-dusted brows. If only Jane had appreciated antiques, liked beautiful things, how happy they might have been!
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it in auction, I’ll take 10 per cent dealer’s fee, and you be Mrs Housewife Princess.’
‘It’s a deal,’ she said. She didn’t believe the bit about only 10 per cent – 90 per cent would be more like it, and how could she ever check – but she was hungry.
‘If you want a job,’ he added, ‘go on up to Avon Farmers and help them out on the float. One pound the hour.’ She went. Arthur thought she was wasted on Bernard; he always had.
And that’s how it happened that Natalie, Sonia, Flora, Ros, and presently Arthur’s Jane were all up at Avon Farmers working on the float in the first week of November just to get it ready. The weather was closing in. The barn was draughty, wind swept the rain across the fields outside in visible sheets, but inside there was warmth and camaraderie, 90p the hour and no questions asked and so what if Flora was getting a pound. Sonia’s and Ros’ children warm in school, with the State paying the heating bills. Something to do. There were no complaints, not at first.
Praxis
But Sonia wouldn’t let things go along happily, would she! Sonia wanted justice. Sonia wanted to get to the root of things. Sonia bore a grudge. Sonia knew the history of the carnival – all those afternoons with Edwina, hanging about, out of the cold in the Folk Museum, had not been wasted. Sonia wanted her past to catch up with her present. Sonia hated men. Sonia hated men in the same way as Angus and Arthur, Harry, Stephen and Alec, to name but a few, hated women. It’s just that men have power and women don’t, so men smile and kiss women and hardly know they hate them, even while they hurt them, and women like Sonia, who hop around the world with as many limbs tied as they have children, turn shrill and desperate and go mad so the men can see them coming and get out in time. Maenads, harridans, hags, witches – don’t look at the Medusa, sir, or you’ll see yourself in her mirror eyes, get turned to stone! Harpy hair and writhing snakes! Shall I tear out a snatch of my hair and hand it to you? Would you like that? No?
A pill, please. I must finish the story.
The WAEADA float was to take to the road on the Wednesday night. On the Tuesday morning Arthur’s wife Jane cam
e up to see if she could help. She was carrying the leather bucket. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were red with crying, but her clothes were expensive. The others were dressed by Oxfam.
‘Are you sure you want to?’ asked Sonia. ‘We’re all on the dole. You don’t want to get infected.’
But Jane said Arthur had sent her up. She cried into her pot of paint until finally Ros asked her what was up. She said that she kept getting telephone calls from someone who put the phone down when she answered and it was getting her down. ‘You mean it might be one of Arthur’s fancy women?’ asked Flora, right out. ‘Don’t you take any notice of those: those are just his sillinesses. Arthur’s all right.’
‘She wouldn’t keep ringing if it was still going on,’ said Ros. ‘Whatever it was, it’s finished.’
But in spite of this comfort Jane still trembled and wept so much she had to be given a cup of tea.
‘Marriage!’ she said. ‘But what’s the alternative? I’m too old to start again. And he can do as he pleases because what in the world is there to stop him?’
‘You can’t stop them,’ said Natalie, ‘all you can do is feel differently about it in your head. You can learn not to care.’
What did Natalie know about it? What she’d lost to Marion Hopfoot was nothing. What Jane was losing was really quite something. What Sonia had lost was even more. Natalie saying what she did made Sonia even crosser. While women adapt, and adapt and adapt, men will continue to get away with everything. If Jane hadn’t come up weeping and wailing to the barn at Avon Farmers, if Natalie hadn’t been so complacent, perhaps what was to happen wouldn’t have happened.
‘I reckon,’ said Sonia, laying down her paintbrush, ‘you can stop men doing things.’
‘How?’ asked Natalie. These days her attitude towards Sonia was not quite antagonistic, but certainly somehow defiant.
