One day, she went too far. He’d just got home, at nearly ten o’clock one summer’s evening, as she undoubtedly knew. She’d probably been watching from her window and had seen him put his car in the garage because she came thumping down the stairs a mere five minutes later before he’d had time to have anything to eat or drink. He’d had a particularly trying day, driving back from a frustrating time with John Lennon (he was writing the Beatles’ biography then) who had swum up and down his pool without speaking for hours on end. The last thing he was up to was being harangued by Mrs Hall; but there she was, hammering on the door as usual and shouting his name. I was furious, so this time I opened the door myself, and before she could start said I was sorry but my husband was tired and not able to listen to her at the moment. She could either tell me what she wanted or else wait until the morning. She glared at me through her enormous spectacles and said, ‘He’s there. I know he’s there. Mr Davies, I know you’re there!’ I told her I hadn’t denied that he was there, that on the contrary I’d said he’d just come home and was exhausted, far too exhausted to attend to her needs. I repeated that she could tell me what the problem was or else wait until the morning. I knew it couldn’t be a real emergency or she’d have made a great drama out of it, so it must be something trivial. But she wouldn’t reveal what it was. For a moment, I thought she was going to push the door further open and barge into the kitchen but she obviously thought better of it – I was bigger and fitter than she and just as good at bullying if need be – and muttering to herself she went back up to her own quarters.
The next morning, he went up as promised and mended the washer on a tap. He said she was quite polite and even grateful, going so far as to hope he’d had a good night’s sleep. But later that week a friend of hers came to visit and I heard what Mrs Hall said to her, as they toiled up the stairs. ‘He’s a nice young man, Maudie,’ she confided, ‘but her, the wife, she’s a tough one, she wears the trousers and no mistake. I feel sorry for the poor fellow, I do really.’ The fate of every wife-as-protector is to be portrayed as a battle-axe, as a harridan, with her husband to be pitied. It amused me to capitalise on Mrs Hall’s image of me thereafter, but the little incident nicely pointed up the dangers of being that kind of ‘good wife’.
The wife who protects must never be seen to do so.
It was held against Jennie, and not just by her husband’s own family, that she gave Nye no children. It was her duty, wasn’t it? Her decision not to have children however much Nye wanted them (and it is probably true he wanted them very much indeed) was seen as selfish, yet another example of her putting her own wishes first, another instance of her repudiating her wifely duty.
But I would defend Jennie absolutely – it was not her duty. She was not married in church and never agreed that marriage was for the procreation of children. Before ever she agreed to become Nye’s wife, she made it clear that she didn’t intend to become pregnant. He fully understood why, and didn’t consider he had any right to overrule Jennie’s wishes. She had been honest, and he accepted what this meant. To her, it all seemed quite simple and straightforward, but in general it is neither. It is one of the trickiest problems a wife who does not want children faces if her husband does want them, and can remain a running issue, never quite resolved till she is past child-bearing age.
I certainly worried about it because, like Jennie, though with nothing like her conviction, I thought I didn’t want children. I had no great career they would get in the way of, but I couldn’t see how I could make myself into a good mother. And apart from that, I had no maternal urge. Looking at my contemporaries, it seemed to me that most women had babies either because they had been careless or because it was the next stage in life and followed on automatically from getting married, or else because they simply longed for children. But I wasn’t careless, and I didn’t follow any course automatically. Since I didn’t feel any real longing for children, I would have to have actual reasons for having them. I couldn’t think of any. It was pure self-indulgence. I imagined a child of mine asking me, as I’d asked my mother, ‘Why did you have me?’ and not being able to give a reason except the one she gave (‘Because I wanted children’), which I’d found so unsatisfactory.
But my husband, like Nye, wanted them. He’d always wanted them. Told I didn’t, he had an irritating confidence that I would change my mind. Maybe Nye secretly had the same confidence – Jennie would come round to the idea and he needn’t fret about it. But on the other hand, he knew her very well and knew how dedicated she was to her work, so he can’t have counted on such a change of heart. The vital thing was, it didn’t matter. He loved her, and never saw her as a mere vehicle to carry and bear his offspring.
Three years after we were married, we stood outside the house we’d bought, looking up at it, and Hunter talked in a sentimental fashion about its being a real family house. He said, ‘I’d like a little face at every window.’ I counted the windows. Five. No chance. But by that time it was true that I had indeed begun to have second thoughts. It was very strange, the discovery that I could experience this odd physical sensation of suddenly craving a baby. I resisted it. I still had no reasons, other than the body’s demands and the pleading of emotions. There was the awful temptation to give into them. Instead of ‘why?’ it became ‘why not?’ Duty didn’t come into it. It had always worried me that in not having children I would be thwarting his great desire to father them, which would be unfair and wrong, and I’d imagined I would have to struggle with my conscience, and maybe I’d lose the struggle. I watched him, as Jennie watched Nye, playing with other people’s children, and saw how he loved them and how they loved him and what a wonderful father he would make. If I hadn’t then felt that famous maternal urge myself, I might have given in to his need. Otherwise, however much my mind stoutly defended my own right to remain childless, I would have felt guilty, unlike Jennie who never felt guilty about anything.
Not so very long ago, when all women were married in church, they promised, in effect, to breed. It was the very fear of becoming pregnant that led so many of them into becoming wives when what they really wanted, in the short term at least, was to be lovers. But once women acquired the means of avoiding pregnancy, as Jennie did, they didn’t need to become wives for that reason alone. They were enlightened. Outside the Church, marriage need not be primarily for the procreation of children. And yet there lingers on the attitude the Bevan family had towards Nye’s childless wife – people do still think it is a wife’s duty to bear a husband’s children. They think less of her as a wife, less of her as a woman, if she refuses to. The rising numbers of women who do refuse mystify people; even today they are seen as denying their own natures. Fifty years ago, Jennie Lee chose what she wanted. She wanted to be his wife, not some kind of battery hen.
Jennie shocked herself in that letter she wrote but never sent, in which she came to the reluctant conclusion that in the event of a crisis it was the wife’s place, the woman’s place not the man’s, to give up her work to relieve the stress of the marriage. To suggest this went against everything she had always believed, it turned upside-down her personal creed. She was depressed when she wrote the letter, and she certainly never acted upon it by giving up her own work, but nevertheless the fact that she could think the unthinkable was heresy. It showed that even she had encountered the same problems as other, more conventional wives and had found no way round them. If a wife knows her husband’s job is more ‘important’ than her own, should she give up her work in order to make both their lives easier and their marriage more serene?
Jennie knew the answer in theory: a resounding no. But in practice she had been compelled for a while to contemplate the inevitable. In her case it never happened, but it was a close-run thing. Sacrifice was very nearly called for, and she was obliged in her darkest moments to think of casting herself in the role of wife-as-martyr, one for which she could not have been less suited. Nothing must get in the way of Nye’s leading the Labour Party
one day and by giving up her work in order that her energy might further this, she felt she would be doing a far, far better thing than she had ever done. It was horribly tempting, just for a short time, to see self-fulfilment in the suppression of her own ambitions to secure his. She didn’t succumb to the temptation, but if she had done, doubtless she would have been thought a very good wife indeed.
Translated into the language of the average marriage, this kind of thinking still goes on. As ever, there are good old economic reasons for it (though they are beginning to change): the husband’s work is more important because he earns the money to support the family. In thousands of marriages, where the wife is said not to work because she stays at home and looks after children and house, it is as simple as that. It was in mine. He was the one for years and years with the ‘real’ job, the one bringing in a regular salary. My work, writing, brought in very little for almost twenty years, not even enough to buy our food never mind pay bills. It seemed entirely proper that when things were tough my work should go on hold and that he should be protected from whatever circumstances were making them tough. Babies screaming all night, mostly. He never once got up to attend to them and I never once expected him to. He had to go to work. If he was to do his job, he had to have a good night’s sleep. There was no argument about it, and I felt no resentment. But I often wished I was the one whose work mattered enough for me to get that night’s sleep.
Things changed when the children were older and he himself had become a freelance journalist and was also at home writing books, but they didn’t change enough. He used his work as a shield to protect him against any disruption or crisis. ‘I have to go and work now,’ he was given to announcing loudly, at crucial moments. Somehow I never said it. Partly this was because writing had never seemed as important to me as the children, but also – and this was irrational – it was because I couldn’t rid myself of the belief that what he was doing was more serious. He was still, to me, the breadwinner, even though I was by then winning a good share of the bread. It was stupid, but I felt my real job was bringing up the children and writing was an extra. He never felt that. Wives dealt with everything domestic, including managing the children.
The children have long since gone, and we both have as much time as we want to work, to write. Has that made us equal? Unfortunately not. His work still seems more important than mine, simply because it is a more important part of his life. He can’t set it aside the way I can, and do. I know perfectly well that if we had been in a situation where we both had jobs outside the house and there had been the need for one of us to give up work in order to be at home when, say, a child was ill, it would have been me. But it wouldn’t have been because I was the wife, or because it was the woman’s role, but because I wouldn’t have been able to choose work over family. My head would have said this attitude was ridiculous, and that I should do it, but I wouldn’t have listened. If I couldn’t organise my work so that it could run side by side with looking after my family, without exhausting myself, there would be no contest. I am not proud of this. It is not right or rational. But in this respect, I am feeble. I would have given in at the first clash between the needs of the family and my own need to work. As it is, I haven’t had to. I am profoundly grateful that my sort of work has never demanded a straight choice from me. The strain on wives from whom it has been demanded fills me with alarm. Jennie’s opinion (if never put to the real test) that the woman should give up her work to keep the marriage running smoothly, in the event of unbearable pressure of work for both husband and wife, is not one that, rationally, I share.
It is just that for me it has been easier.
Jennie hated to be called Mrs Bevan. I dislike being called Mrs Davies. She kept her own name because she had a separate and well-established public identity before she married. I didn’t have any such thing, but I never for one moment thought of calling myself Margaret Davies when I had a book published. Who was she? Not anyone I recognised. Davies seems to me a dull name anyway, whereas Forster is Cumbrian, with a strong, regional pull to it. I like having two names, reflecting two distinct roles. Forster is the writer, Davies is the wife and mother, and I can choose which to be.
I don’t like being referred to as ‘my wife’ and I don’t like saying ‘my husband’. Even after forty years, these terms sound awkward and quaint to me, somehow pompous. He likes saying ‘my wife’ – possessiveness, again? I try hard never to refer to him as ‘my husband’, even when it is absurd and confusing not to do so. ‘This is Hunter’ says very little. It is silly of me to avoid using the correct and useful term. On the other hand, the term ‘partner’ seems to me equally confusing. Partner in what? Business, crime? Whenever I hear it, I think of American westerns – ‘How do, pardner’ – and it sounds hilarious. ‘Friend’ is coy, ‘lover’ flash. And yet some accurate, descriptive word is needed.
‘Wife’ is accurate, ‘wife’ is descriptive, though not descriptive enough. But recast the mould of ‘wife’ and it would be perfect. A wife is no longer what she once was. She is a much stronger creature, not at all submissive, able to match her husband right for right.
Epilogue
To study the form of Solemnisation of Matrimony in the original Anglican prayer-book, according to which Mary Livingstone was married (and many women still are), is to be startled by the emphatic way in which it expects a woman to agree to such sweeping subjection to the will of a man. It is a truly terrifying step to become a wife. Even leaving aside the promise to ‘obey and serve’, the language of the other promises, of the psalms and of the prayers, makes it painfully clear that this is no partnership being legitimised but an act of domination sanctified by the Church. It appears designed not just to impress but to alarm and create an atmosphere of tension. Even if the banns have gone unchallenged, there is still that last ringing inquiry at the beginning of the service itself – ‘Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not be lawfully joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.’ Followed by that awful pause, lasting no more than a minute, a minute of rustling and discreet coughing, but a minute of rising panic – what if someone did shout ‘Stop this marriage!’? The imagination could run away with itself, aided and abetted by such dramatic pauses.
Then there are the ponderous, introductory words of the priest to consider. Holy matrimony, it is alleged, is not a simple matter of a man and a woman coming together but ‘instituted of God in the time of man’s innocence, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church’. The man, this implies, is the Christ figure, the woman the Church, a confusing and difficult metaphor. Progressing, as the priest is instructed to, to the ‘causes for which matrimony was ordained’, is to find most of them tough on the woman. First, the procreation of children, ‘to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord’; second, as ‘a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication’; third, ‘for mutual society, help and comfort’. Marriage is for those ‘as have not the gift of continency’, a wife is merely to be a handy way of making incontinency respectable. The suggested prayers hold little comfort. Once more, the woman is told to be ‘loving and amiable, faithful and obedient to her husband; and in all quietness, sobriety and peace to be a follower of holy and godly matrons.’
As a contract, it is binding until death with absolutely no room for manoeuvre. Of course, women like Mary Livingstone did not and do not see marriage as a social contract, but as a union blessed by God, subject to God’s law. But regarded as a contract the Anglican Solemnisation of Matrimony is vague in the extreme, enough to keep lawyers arguing for centuries about its implications if they wished (or dared). It was a clever but legally shoddy piece of work.
Contrast it with the civil ceremony, first instituted in this country in 1837. No banns had to be called, though notice of a marriage had to be given well in advance to a superintendent registrar. The room in which the short ceremony took place was invariably office-like, the atmosphere forma
l and quite unlike that of a church. The superintendent, however hard he tried to introduce a note of solemnity and dignity, could not hope to match the magnificence of the priest in his vestments. There was no music, no prayers, no hymns, no psalms. Someone might put a bunch of flowers on a table but otherwise there was no adornment of the premises. Numbers of guests allowed in were restricted. There was no attempt made to overawe with procedure, though the registrar was required to preface the ceremony with a reminder of the binding nature of marriage. But the words of the simple declaration both man and woman had to make were not intimidating – no mention of death, fornication or subjection. All that had to be said was ‘I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment why I [name] may not be joined in matrimony to [name]’, followed by ‘I call upon these persons here present to witness that I do take thee to be my lawful wedded [wife/husband]’. The words are identical for man and woman. Rings could then be exchanged but they were not obligatory, and there was no blessing of them if they were. An entry was made in the register, signed, and a certificate made out.
Good Wives Page 35
