Her Living Image

by Jane Rogers

  Clare was in the kitchen, washing up.

  “Hello. We’d given you up.”

  “Is there anything to eat?”

  “Of course. Isn’t there always, in this haven of domesticity? Sit down.”

  Caro sat at the table and Clare removed a heaped plate from the oven and placed it in front of her.

  “Oh God.”

  “Well that’s nice. Here I am, slaving over a hot stove to provide you with nourishing victuals two hours late, and all you can say is –”

  “All right, all right. I’m deeply grateful, Clare. But it is yesterday’s cauliflower cheese, warmed up, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes. I put some more cheese in it.”

  “Oh good. Wonderful.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “How can you tell?” Caro began to eat, pulling a face as she did so.

  “It makes you more caustic.”

  “Like you, you mean.”

  “Possibly.” Clare emptied the bowl and sat down, drying her hands.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Tell me all.”

  “Nothing to tell. I went for a drink after work.”

  “With?”

  “With a man. An architect. He gave me a lift home.”

  “You could have invited him in for some warmed-up cauliflower cheese.”

  “He’s got dinner, a wife and three children waiting for him at home.”

  “Ah.”

  Caro filled her mouth with cauliflower and chewed stolidly while Clare watched her.

  “D’you like him?”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes.” She put down her fork and pushed the plate away. “I don’t know. It’s stupid. I’ve met him quite a few times – you know, at work. I didn’t – I didn’t think –”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t think he would turn up for a drink tonight. And I wanted him to.”

  “Does he live with his wife?”

  “Most married men do, don’t they?”

  “All right, stupid. I was just hoping it wouldn’t be as gruesome as that.”

  “It won’t be. I mean, he told me he was married. He wasn’t hiding it. We spent ages talking about his kids. It’s not – I’m not – it won’t get beyond the odd drink after work.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “Because it won’t. How can it?”

  “Easily.”

  “Look Clare –”

  “Look yourself, Caro. D’you realize this is a record. This is the first time you have ever admitted that you fancy someone?”

  “I don’t fancy him. And what about Martin, anyway?”

  “You didn’t fancy him, you felt sorry for him. D’you feel sorry for this one?”

  “No.”

  “All right then.”

  Caro fetched a packet of biscuits from the cupboard and opened them.

  “Is Sue working?”

  “Yes. Robin and Sylvie are in.”

  “They’re quiet.”

  “They’re watching telly.”

  After a pause Caro spoke slowly. “I do like him. It’s – it’s a strange thing. He’s very critical. I mean, he argues with everything I think. But it’s as if – it’s not an argument exactly, it’s more as if he wants to test – I’m not sure, himself or me. He pretends to be – you know, charming, cynical – but there’s a – a crack in his shell – not his shell but his manner; underneath he’s open-minded, really open to everything – as if he still doesn’t know what the world’s like.”

  Clare groaned. “You want to mother him.”

  “No.”

  “Well you’ve just described a child, if he doesn’t know what the world’s like.”

  “No – I haven’t. You’re not listening. It’s – it’s different because – because he is, he has got that manner – style, whatever you call it, he’s developed it and that lets him – be more – I can’t explain. . . . It’s like a mask. You can be something different behind it, something more real. Instead of if your real face is the one you always have to have on show.”

  Clare looked as if she was going to reply, for a minute, then she shrugged and ran her fingers through her hair. When she spoke it was with heavy irony.

  “So you’ll help him to come out, as they say. Out from behind the mask.”

  Caro’s face flushed angry red.

  “Why do you – why pretend you want to talk?”

  Clare bowed her head till her forehead was resting on the table top. She heard Caro’s chair scrape as she stood up.

  “If you want to know what I’m going to do, I’ll tell you. I’ll have infrequent conversations with him over lunch in the canteen, and that’s all.”

  “And be miserable.”

  “I don’t know. I hope not.” She went out of the kitchen, closing the door sharply behind her.

  Clare sat still with her forehead resting on the table. Caro would be miserable anyway, that was obvious. Either they would have an affair and Caro would be racked with misery and guilt because of the wretched man’s family, or they wouldn’t, and she would decide he was the love of her life and never see through him.

  “You’re a ridiculous fucking romantic,” she muttered to the floor.

  Caro wasn’t a romantic, Clare told herself later that night, sitting in her room pretending to read. She still didn’t know what Caro was. She was clear, like water. Transparent but unpredictable. Her character isn’t – like anything, Clare thought. Some people do wear their characters like make-up; yes, all right, like a mask, telling you exactly how they expect you to react to them. They’re full of definites: “I always . . . I never. . . .” There was an actress Clare had seen on a school outing, years ago – at elementary school. After the show the children were allowed to ask the actress questions. Somebody asked her how old she was. The woman’s brilliant smile was still vivid in Clare’s memory, along with her special-confidential-actress-voice answer: “One thing you’ll learn as you grow up, is that we never, never ask a lady her age. Now would you like to ask a different question, dear?”

  Clare had thought, it will be like that when you grow up. You’ll know. She had admired the actress passionately. The memory still niggled her, as did a dozen similar phrases dropped into her consciousness like small pebbles into shoes, since then. Caro was not like that.

  Caro was like water, like the taste of water. They had actually been lovers for a very short time only. Clare was aware from the beginning that Caro was still, finally, self-contained. They were close, they could be happy together, but even at the most intimate moments, Caro retained a reserve. It might be (Clare sometimes thought it was) a final, last-ditch unconquerable anxiety about making love with another woman. Or it might just be that she was not in love with Clare. She hadn’t seemed to be in love with anyone else either – but maybe now, she was. Who could tell? Clare had been in love with other people. She had been in love with Stephen, in the States. She was sick of being in love. It was always a mess. She would reorganize her life, live celibately, and get the Mad Bitches on their feet again. That was what she had to do. Pity she couldn’t raise any enthusiasm, though.

  Since she had come back from America Clare had felt old; weighed down by the past, by too many ideas and enthusiasms and loves. It had all coagulated into a great stony mass that she had to drag around with her, wearing herself out. It had all gone wrong. Look at Juan, and the baby; could she really disclaim responsibility? Yes, at the time when it had happened; it may have been a mistake on her part, but it was also a textbook example of women’s oppression. It had made her one with a movement. Juan was not an isolated freak; hundreds of thousands of anti-establishment, lefty men who had seemed to accept women as equals and understand the causes of their anger, had turned out like him. Who’s going to cook the tea? Who’s going to hold the baby? How can I pursue a brilliant and demanding political career which is going to lead to a revolution and the granting of all your feminist demands, if I
’ve got to stay home and wash the fucking nappies? Until, sixteen months after the baby was born, Clare had lifted her head from the sink one morning and understood clearly that both of them had good degrees in political science, and that he spent his days lecturing and his evenings discussing revolution in intellectually stimulating company, while she spent her days feeding and pulling faces at a baby, shopping, cleaning and washing up, and her evenings sitting alone in the house waiting for the kid to cry. And that this caused him to be admired for his ceaseless, selfless work, while her identity was solely defined by his possession of her (“Juan’s wife”).

  It had felt like a victory when she left him: a liberation. The Women’s Movement had become the mainspring of Clare’s life. They would change the world. The tide had swept through the consciousness of America. Suddenly everyone was talking about women: their employment, their pay, their sexuality, their education, their health, their politics, their feelings. Women were talking to each other – meeting in C.R. groups, identifying their common bonds and desires, writing and reading books and magazines about the movement. The sense of a movement which could reach out and touch the life of every woman in the world had infused all her work; it had been there at the beginning of the Refuge, when they had planned it and set it up, and even in the first year or two of its running. Clare didn’t know when it had slipped away. She had pulled out of the Refuge when it was well established at last, independent with its grant assured. It was a success, and the fact that it could function without her was proof of that.

  But then she had had time to look around, and take stock of where the movement was going. Where it was going . . . ? Where it had gone. It had shrivelled – dissipated its sweeping force into a handful of loony sidestreams. Suddenly, she was a political dinosaur. The women she had loved and worked with were scattered to the four winds: living on pot and brown rice in self-sufficient Welsh communes (she supposed that Wales was wet enough to grow brown rice, but the climate was hardly ideal for marijuana); or converted to bizarre Eastern religions; turned into successful media-persons who, like Animal Farm’s pigs, were suddenly no different at all from the media-men (apart from their mandatory media-woman good looks); or married and terribly busy with children, their CND/Labour Party/SDP membership cards languishing in the depths of their large, safety-pin-filled handbags. These women met her with a gentle incredulity, half superior, half envious: “Are you still keeping up with all that, Clare? I don’t know how you find the time.”

  And those few she could find who still regarded the Women’s Movement as the central issue were like a concentrate, a bitter distillation of what had been before. Many of them hated men, even rejecting their own boy-children. Clare was depressed to hopelessness by it, chilled to the marrow. Hadn’t the Women’s Movement been about changing ordinary women’s lives? Ordinary women lived with men, had sex with them, gave birth to sons. The separatists had no more connection with them than Martians. She had not left Juan to be part of a movement that rejected all men. She had thought she was helping to lay the foundations for a new way of living with them.

  It was over, it had been thrown away. While she was still angry and disbelieving, Clare had joined Women-in-the-Moon, a feminist theatre group. The group had spent a year tearing itself apart over ideology and material. At last she and two others had left to form the Mad Bitches. The Mad Bitches were not ideologically sound. They were bitter and funny. They could actually play working men’s clubs and not get booed off the stage. They did their opening number, “Mad Maggie Blues”, in fishnet bodystockings. Bryony had walked out of their first show, and refused to see any others.

  Bryony.

  Clare appreciated Greenham. It seemed to her the only positive fruit this new, embittered, man-hating movement had borne. It was a symbol the media – and thus the world – could neither distort nor ignore; women united in their stand against the ultimate male obscenity. She appreciated the hardships the peace women suffered: the cold, the mud, the hostility, the occasional corroding sense of futility. She appreciated their courage, their organization, and their imagination. It would have been a relief to be able to join them. But it was no good, she couldn’t. She had had a long and terrible argument with Bryony – really it was over the exclusion of men, but somehow it spread to other aspects of Greenham.

  “I don’t like the things they do!” she had shouted in exasperation.

  “What things?” Bryony wanted to know.

  “The way they tie things to trees and fences. Photos of their children on the fence, tied up with ribbon. I can’t take that sort of crap.”

  “Why’s it crap?”

  “I don’t know. It’s maudlin. It’s – it’s fey.”

  “It’ll be fucking maudlin when all the kids are dead of radiation, won’t it!” shouted Bryony.

  “Bryony – I can’t. All this mystical stuff – weaving symbolic webs of wool – I’m sorry, I just can’t relate to it. I think it’s silly.”

  “So do men,” Bryony pointed out. There was no more to be said.

  Bryony hadn’t argued with Caro. She hadn’t expected her to go. Yet she had seen Clare’s refusal as a betrayal, and been bitterly upset by it. Caro, Clare reflected, had never aligned herself with anything. She was always on the edge. They had come to accept the fact that she remained a permanent outsider. Often in the past Clare had been enraged by it; called it weakness and cowardice, that Caro would not stand up to be counted or campaign for her beliefs. But her refusal to join groups or attend meetings was absolute. For a long time Clare had thought the whole business of Caro pottering about in the garden, and then pruning bushes in the park, was some kind of evasion; at last she had come to realize that that was what Caro did. That was how she had found her voice. Not that Caro ever described it in those terms. It is only me, Clare thought, who needs to talk about changing the world. Everyone else gets on with living. Why can’t I just be one of the Mad Bitches, and do what I do, and be happy? On an impulse, she went to Caro’s room, and seeing no light under the door, opened it softly. But Caro was asleep; the sound of her regular breathing was like a whisper in the air. Clare looked at her watch and went downstairs. Sue would be back at half-past twelve; her shift had started at four. Sue had no ridiculous pretensions about changing the world. They would have sardines on toast and a mug of cocoa together. Consolation, Clare told herself grimly. Don’t women always console themselves with food?

  Chapter 18

  Alan and Caro’s relationship developed in a stubborn, contorted fashion, sprouting up like a weed in a different place each time it was prevented. Each made a private decision not to seek the other out, and to let the thing die a natural death. Each (at separate times) took positive steps to avoid meeting, by going out rather than to lunch at the canteen. They both persisted in the pretence that all their meetings were accidental – though having coincided by chance at lunch time, they did occasionally arrange to meet for an after-work drink. It was impossible to stop talking: about work, politics, their pasts, friends, houses, holidays, art, books, ideas, fashions, music – everything (except Alan’s wife and children).

  The park was occupying a lot of Caro’s energy and attention. When she described it to Alan, it seemed to him that she was talking about something much more precious than a patch of green for kids to run around in. He was half amused by her fanatical enthusiasm – and slightly shamed by it, because it was a feeling he could not and did not match, in his own work. He caught himself thinking of her as almost childish, at times, for being so single-minded and certain about anything. Her view seemed to him to be naïve, unworldly. He recognized how much easier life would be if he could feel contempt for her at any level. But contempt was impossible to sustain.

  She took him to the park site one evening after work. They left at five-thirty on the dot but it was an overcast evening, and by the time they had walked halfway round the area the dusk was thick blue. She described what the area had been like before, and Alan listened in silence,
caught up by her intensity, but also slightly embarrassed by it. He was glad of the dark. The park was near her home, a run-down, beaten-up part of town that Alan had never known well. Here, she told him, there had been a football pitch, with troughs of mud and mangy tufts of grass. On sunny days, bits of broken glass sparkled in the mud, and a crowd of close-cropped lads lounged around the goalposts smoking, and chasing away the little kids who came to play. On that side were the ruins of two derelict mills, too far gone for restoration. Over on the other side there was a disused primary school they would keep, it was being converted to a field study centre for local schools. Alan wondered who the conversion had gone to; he found himself thinking that it would be much more interesting than the health clinic lined up for him. Beyond the mills, she continued, were the rows of terraces – mean little houses, with low ceilings and dark cramped rooms, two up two down, with a squalor of makeshift extensions in the tiny backyards; kitchen lean-tos with leaking corrugated iron roofs, or soggy bathrooms running with condensation and blocking all light from the downstairs back rooms. Many of them had stood boarded up for years, waiting for the condition and value of the neighbouring houses to deteriorate sufficiently for their inhabitants to agree to be rehoused. They came to the edge of the river, sleek and black in the dark, its clean surface catching and reflecting glints of distant streetlights. It looked curiously naked, in its banks of empty mud. It used to stink, she told him – flowing like thick soup through the entrails of cars, old prams and bicycles, with a scum of chemical filth and small dead animals. Two little boys had drowned there one summer a few years back, although it was no more than two feet deep. They were probably poisoned by it before they drowned.

  They walked on over the uneven muddy ground in silence. Now they had moved away from the river bank Alan was completely disorientated. There were no landmarks in the dark, apart from the streetlights at the edges of the park, which were not always visible because the park seemed to be full of uphills and downhills.