I want to explain about Tom because I think it will help everyone understand how I felt about Patrick. You see, human beings can feel things so deeply. I know that but it wasn’t part of my life. I felt I had been skating on thin ice all my emotional life. Never getting under the surface and I didn’t want that for my kids. I wanted passion for them. I wanted something extraordinary because what I had was only ordinary. I’m not blaming Adam. It’s just how things were. You had passion, Inge. You must know what I mean.
Womb with a View
To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’
(GENESIS 4.16)
Miss March, the lawyer, is much more confident than the psychiatrist. He favours a pencil but she writes everything down in pen.
Fact — the Bic pen was invented by a French baron called Bich. He dreamt up the smooth-flowing ball-point in 1953 and probably never had to write a cheque again. There are now three thousand million of them sold each year. The Japanese invented the felt tip and the self-propelling pencil. The fountain pen may have been around in 1748 when Catherine the Great wrote in her diary about using an ‘endless quill’, but then she also died making love to a horse so she may not be a reliable historical witness.
Miss March thinks I am nearly ready to testify but she is very worried about what I should wear. It is very important that I look demure. She has the facts at her manicured fingertips. Imagine that — a lawyer and time to do her nails. Basically it’s the non-killer look that she’s going for. Certainly I mustn’t wear anything that might suggest any strength about me and she doesn’t want me to mention the classes Martha held.
That’s what I was talking about, wasn’t it? Sorry. Anyway, I didn’t mean to go to the classes. It happened by accident. Mother was still in the hospital and needed some fresh night things, so I popped over one evening to her house, our old house, to get them. It’s just an ordinary semi. I’d grown up there but that night I didn’t know the place. Jesus on his bits of velvet had disappeared and in his place were a lot of candles and posters for flower remedies and tea tree oil, that sort of thing. From the minute Mother moved out Martha hadn’t wasted any time. She had swept down from her London club and changed everything. Even the basics. Out was draylon and in were natural fibres and untreated wood. I think you could have boiled most of the furniture and got quite a hearty meal.
There were about six women in the sitting room when I arrived. They were drinking red wine and wearing a lot of flowing things. I didn’t seem to know any of them except Theresa Baker from the library, who was clutching a box of Sainsbury’s red. Theresa handed me a glass of wine while a woman in swirls of multi-coloured batik held forth.
‘Oh, it’s the most awful business. They need the pregnant mares so they routinely slaughter foals, re-impregnate the mares as soon as possible and start all over again.’ A tiny ferret of a woman in one corner looked quite faint.
‘Hello,’ I said brightly. ‘Sorry to interrupt, just come to get—’
‘You’re just in time,’ declared Martha. ‘You all know my sister Eve. She’s perfect. Ordinary as the day is long. We need your opinion, as an ordinary woman.’
‘What on?’
‘Urine farms,’ said Theresa Baker, pouring more wine. ‘For hormone replacement therapy. You know, HRT.’
I looked blank, so Mrs Batik, who’d started the whole thing, ploughed on. ‘They harvest natural oestrogen from the urine of pregnant mares. The mares are fitted with a collection cup, which is attached to the horse who is then confined to a narrow stall for the whole eleven-month pregnancy. It’s huge business. There are over eighty thousand mares in US urine farms. And why do women do it? Hmmm?’
She seemed to look straight at me. I rummaged through back issues of Cosmo in my mind and made a stab in the dark.
‘Does it make your skin look younger?’
‘Oh that, yes, and keeps your eyes moist, improves your husband’s sex life, stops glaucoma, Alzheimer’s, but at what cost?’
I didn’t know but I thought it sounded pretty good on the surface.
‘Are we nearly ready, Theresa, only I’ve got to—’ whispered the ferret woman.
‘Yes, yes, just waiting for Brian to go out. He’s off to the pub.’
Martha leant over and whispered to me. ‘Brian’s Theresa’s partner. There’s something wrong with the boiler and he’s just looking at it.’
We sat and waited for Brian to be brilliant with boilers followed by being ready to leave. I should have gone then but I hadn’t finished my wine and there was a slightly uncomfortable silence that I couldn’t think how to break. We’d done urine farms and didn’t know each other well enough to move on till Brian had gone. Martha is younger than me and so were the other women in the group. Not by much, but I felt out of place. I don’t normally drink but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. We all had a good sup till finally Brian appeared in the door.
‘All sorted,’ he said, looking awkward. ‘Well, you girls have a good time. We chaps’ll be in the pub!’ He laughed rather heartily. ‘Right. Bye then.’ Brian waved goodbye and after a moment we all waved back. Then we sat and waited for the front door to close before my sister began.
‘Right, well, welcome to the Edenford Women’s Study Group and to what I hope will be a regular Tuesday gathering. A meeting where we will come together not to change the world but to reassess our place in it.’ So far so good, I thought. I quite wanted to reassess my place in the world. Indeed, I wasn’t at all sure that I even had one. I had never seen Martha at work and it was fascinating to watch as she flowed on.
‘Right, how many of you managed to read The Female Eunuch and The Whole Woman before you came?’ She held up a copy of The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer. I’d read about it in the paper but I hadn’t seen a copy till then. It wasn’t something Mr Wilton carried in the bookshop. That was where I first heard about it. ‘Now you won’t need me to tell you that the key to this book is the castration of women.’
There was a lot of general nodding so I had some more wine. ‘And we need to examine that, quite literally. Why are we castrated?’ Before anyone had a chance to answer, Martha was off. ‘I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that as women, our genitalia are hidden. How many of us in this room have ever really examined our sexual organs?’ Despite the large amount of batik and the small number of brassieres in the room, it wasn’t a question that evoked a big response.
‘I think,’ said the little ferret woman, ‘that the problem is with communication. I mean with men and their language.’
I nodded because Adam and I often seem to speak a different language, but so too, it seemed, did the ferret woman. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that everything about sexual relations with men is put in the language as a sort of poking, isn’t it? Something that happens to us not with us.’
‘Fucking,’ said Mrs Batik.
‘Screwing and shagging,’ said someone else.
‘What about rooting?’ said Theresa. What about it? I thought. I’d never even heard of it.
The ferret woman was on a roll. ‘I think we need to change our whole attitude to sex. We need to embrace the penis, not just take it.’ There was a pause after this. I don’t know whether we were supposed to think about what she said or just contemplate the very idea of her having sex at all. She seemed such a little, shy thing.
‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Martha, as if the whole evening were going to plan. ‘Thus self-examination. For too long the womb has been seen as a source of weakness and, indeed, wickedness. A source of hysteria, menstrual depression and unfitness for any sustained enterprise. What we need is womb-pride.’
What I needed was not to cook the dinner every day but it seemed like a bad time to mention it.
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said the ferret. ‘I’m not just some hole waiting to be filled. I’m not just a vacuum
. I’m a woman.
‘What is the worst word anyone can think of?’ asked Mrs Batik.
I quite liked the question. It reminded me of midnight feasts at school when no one had been able to stay awake past ten o’clock and it all got a bit silly.
‘Bugger,’ I said.
‘No. Worse than that,’ admonished Mrs Batik. No one wanted to say, not even the ferret, so Theresa did.
‘Cunt,’ she proclaimed, and then looked through the door to make sure Brian hadn’t come back. The word was like a trigger for Martha.
‘Exactly. You see,’ she said. ‘You’re all shocked. So where does that leave us? We can’t say the name of a part of the female body but everyone’s quite happy to sit and watch death and destruction every day on their televisions without doing a thing about it. Day after day, endless reports of atrocities, nobody gets their arses off the sofa. One mention of a cunt on the television and everyone would be writing to Anne Robinson.’
Theresa chose that moment to draw me into the discussion. ‘Eve, what do you think?’
‘I think we might change the subject,’ I managed rather weakly.
Martha nodded. ‘All right. Let’s talk penis size.’
I was too far from the door to leave and she seemed to be talking straight at me. I had some more wine while my sister, my little sister in my parent’s sitting room, went on.
‘Why is it that men are allowed to be obsessed with the size of their sexual organs while women are supposed to keep theirs nice and tidy? Men want to swing through the world like an elephant’s trunk sucking up peanuts, but no woman wants a twat the size of a horse collar — and I quote here from Germaine.’
‘We were born the companion of man and became his slave,’ said a woman in white, who so far had said nothing but had eaten all the twiglets.
‘I think inside each of us there is a voracious, questing creature waiting to get out,’ added Theresa, who sounded like she was quoting too.
Martha kept nodding like one of those toy dogs on the parcel shelf of Ford Fiestas. ‘Now, I know it’s a tricky area for beginners, but we’re going to plunge right in with a self-examination class. Probably not something many of you have given much thought to. A little scary, but trust me. I have been teaching Women’s Studies in the Far East for many years and they think nothing of it.’
Well, I thought self-examination was something to do with the Open University and I had thought about that, so for a moment I was glad I’d come. Anyway it turned out to be something else entirely. Martha was very matter of fact.
‘You will all learn the value of this!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘This,’ she said ‘is a speculum.’ And she produced a thing made of clear plastic with two handles. A bit like a nutcracker really.
‘Now it’s very simple,’ she explained. ‘You simply take the speculum and pop one end up yourself and then open the handles wide and look in with a mirror.’
I felt quite ill. I think if she’d done a practical demonstration I’d have passed out. But they were only a pound and I thought I’d better buy one just to show willing. I’d never felt so foolish or ignorant. The rest of the meeting passed in a bit of a haze. All I remember is Martha’s final benediction as I rode out of the door on a wave of cheap wine and horse urine.
‘Remember, Eve!’ she called after me, ‘liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.’
When I got home I left the speculum thing in my handbag but I couldn’t stop thinking. What if I had one of those diseases they’d been talking about? Maybe that was why I kept bleeding. I didn’t want someone else poking about inside me but maybe I could have a look. See if there was something wrong. A woman should know her own body. Look for my ‘voracious, questing creature’. It’s what I was thinking about when we went to the tennis party.
There were two things in the paper the morning of the tennis party. One that caught my eye and one that actually got Adam’s attention. The first was on the front page and it was about the Romanians. Romanian refugees. The Home Secretary was looking for towns to volunteer to take some of them.
‘They could come here,’ I said. ‘Edenford’s got plenty of room.’
‘Play havoc with the traffic,’ said Adam.
‘I don’t think they’ve got cars,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they’ve got anything.’
‘No, no.’ Adam was impatient. ‘They do that window-cleaning thing. You know, stand in the street and try to clean your car window for money. Plays havoc with the traffic.’
Adam sat down at the table with his notebook and pen. He was forever cataloguing his Shirley Bassey memorabilia. He had been collecting the stuff for thirty years. We probably had more of it in our house than Dame Shirley did in hers.
The other story in the paper was actually about Edenford. In the national newspaper. Adam was thrilled. A young woman had been beaten up at the National bus depot in the late afternoon.
‘Not even dark,’ he kept repeating. ‘Not even dark.’ The local radio phoned and Adam, as a local councillor, had to be interviewed. It was quite exciting.
‘Edenford has always been a safe place. A family place. This will not be tolerated,’ he declared. Then Radio 4 was having a slow news day so they called and he declared it again. By the time we got to the evening I think he actually believed it.
I don’t know whether it had all been too exciting but by the time we were getting ready to go out, Adam was in a great state.
‘Eve, we need to talk,’ he said. He sat down on the bed. ‘I’ve seen the specialist and it needs cream.’
‘What does?’ I asked, trying to decide between a black dress and a blue one. I should have been paying more attention. I thought Adam was going to cry. Adam was wearing his nice grey suit that doubles for funerals with the right tie. It’s easy for men, isn’t it? Women are not expected to be seen in the same dress twice but it was so long since we’d gone out that I couldn’t remember which dress was due for an outing.
‘My injury, my injury! How can you forget about my injury?’
‘I’m sorry.’ We looked at each other, unsure how to move forward. I had forgotten. Adam had had an appointment with the penis specialist that afternoon. I had offered to go with him but we had both pretended not to hear when I said it.
‘Do you want me to put the cream on for you?’ I asked. He nodded and got up to lock the bedroom door and draw the curtains. Even with the light on it made it rather dark and I couldn’t see the injury at all. I put a lot of cream on, all over, while he lay on his back moaning. I kept thinking how unsexy it all was. Then we got dressed. The trainers didn’t go with either of the dresses so I had to dig out another pair of heels. Adam didn’t notice what I wore. He was ready long before me. I went outside to find Adam hanging campaign balloons and ribbons on my car aerial. The election wasn’t for months but they flowed in the wind over the boot of my car.
‘Might as well arrive with the flag flying,’ he said, and pulled the last piece of string a bit tighter. Men like fiddling with straps and fixings on cars. I think it has echoes of pioneers setting off across the plains. There’s a ring of Scott of the Antarctic about it. Adam was a bit too vigorous. One minute the decor was flying high and the next the car aerial snapped backwards and trailed behind us like a much decorated sting on a giant metal bee. The car lurched across town. The gearbox was dying.
I have to go to one of my sessions.
The psychiatrist is beginning to narrow the field in his questions to me.
‘Did you hate John when you killed him?’ he asks.
‘I suppose I must have,’ I said.
‘And is that a common feeling for you? Have you hated many people?’ I thought about it. Did I really hate anyone?
‘Maybe Jane Asher.’ It was a joke but I am not to be funny. I am never to be funny again.
Love,
Eve
Chapter Eleven
William and Pe Pe’s house stood on the top of Church Hill Road. It had terrific views of the tow
n and fields in the distance. It was an amazing place. Keeping up with them was a job no one in the town would undertake lightly. Pe Pe looked stunning. She had had her body Moulinexed into yet another black sheath, which clung to her in a reminder to all of what bodies were supposed to look like. Her make-up was perfect. A smooth sheen of colour that opened her eyes and pouted her mouth. Eve looked at her and knew she looked a disaster. A terrible old blue dress and eye make-up that could have been slapped across her lids by a myopic traffic warden on duty at the time.
‘Lucky bugger,’ Adam whispered to his wife.
‘Who?’ asked Eve, although she knew full well.
‘William, of course.’
Lucky bugger, indeed. It was a boy’s idea of luck. How lucky to have a wife other men covet. Pe Pe wandered about fulfilling her part brilliantly. She was there for the other men to appreciate. For them to envy William having her at his disposal. Eve thought about her women’s study class and had a very unfeminist thought. She longed sharply to be a sex object for just one evening. She envied Pe Pe that night. They could not have been two more different women. Pe Pe was a female sex object and Eve believed she was a female most men would object to having sex with. She wondered what Adam thought of having her on his arm. Eve was much younger than him and that used to help. He probably had never expected her to get old too.
The party was a gathering of everyone who was anyone from the town. Neat little name tags had been filled out in advance. Pe Pe’s read Mrs William Cameron and Eve’s read Mrs Adam Marshall. Once more she had a sense of disappearing. It was new. She had never minded before but now Eve cared terribly. She desperately wanted to be someone she remembered from twenty years ago.
Flying Under Bridges Page 12
