Down Among the Women

by Fay Weldon

She stops talking. He says nothing. She can’t make out whether he is pleased or angry.

  ‘It’s a nice flat,’ she says. ‘With a lovely studio stove. A Pither. I’ve polished it up. It’s brass.’

  ‘It’s good about the prize,’ he says, eventually. She has forgotten all about that part of it.

  ‘It doesn’t mean much,’ she says. ‘I mean they’ve got no judgement, really, have they? People who give prizes.’

  There is silence between them again.

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ he says.

  ‘I won’t go round there,’ she says, ‘ever. It’s your private place.’

  Thus retreating, accommodating, placating, she safeguards her marriage.

  Helen stops complaining about the rent.

  Jocelyn is employed! Jocelyn has found a job at last. She is a temporary assistant clerk in a Government Department. She gets only £6. 2. 0. a week. She grumbles, although, unlike her friends, she has a private income of her own, the interest on money left her by a grandfather, and expectations of even more.

  Jocelyn went to the Marlborough Street Employment Exchange to get the job. There, amongst the kitchen hands and machine sewers, she joined a queue of girl arts graduates. No one wishes to employ them. Why should they? Conceited, self-important girls, with nothing to their credit except a knowledge of Middle English or Diplomatic History, sulking over the filing? Uppity, graceless girls, leaving to get married like anyone else, and in the meantime, troublesome?

  Jocelyn’s talents find her out, however. She ends up in a branch of the Foreign Office, still on £6. 2. 0. a week, sifting refugee reports, and monitoring radio broadcasts from the Eastern Europe Communist Bloc. She writes papers which are read by Churchill and for which her Department head takes credit. When she is not otherwise occupied she makes tea, and files top-secret documents in the crumbly bathroom where the secret files are kept. (The Department is housed in a Georgian mansion in Central London. A few partitions have been built, but otherwise nothing has been changed, except that the water supply to the bath has been cut off, in case important documents get damaged by steam. In the secret files are kept memos from ambassadors, mostly asking for more sherry, or more blankets, or complaining about Embassy Central Heating; and of course the staff’s hats and coats.)

  Sometimes staff are asked to keep to their offices for an hour or so. On one such occasion, peering through the keyhole, Jocelyn sees a group of anonymous and forgettable men, all wearing raincoats although it hasn’t rained for days. Spies, she concludes.

  Jocelyn, writing her reports, interprets the truth as her employers would wish. She does not lie, but neither does she tell the truth. Either way, she does not care. She is preoccupied with her inner world.

  For Jocelyn wants to be married.

  Byzantia, when she reaches nubile age, can be heard to say, ‘I don’t want to get married. Why should I get married? I don’t want to be some man’s wife. Moreover I do not subscribe to these outmoded bourgeois formulae. Children? No, the world’s too terrible a place.’ She means Vietnam and so on, brought to her daily on the telly, before which, in the security of her mother’s house, she sits in protein-fed beauty and laments.

  But Jocelyn wants to be married. She wants to have a white wedding and a reception with a wedding-cake, local photographers, envious ex-boyfriends, a weeping bustling mother and a hoarse-voiced conscientious father. Her parents are rather elderly. They live in a cosy house in a country town, tend the garden, and already consider Jocelyn off their hands. She would not mind reminding them, in this forcible way, of her existence.

  She wants people to say, ‘What a lovely girl. She used to be rather plain, too. Do you remember that hockey phase?’

  She wants to ask Miss Bonny to her wedding. She promised herself this when she was fifteen. She wants to have a London flat, to have an account at Harrods, to be known as Mrs. She wants to entertain.

  She wants a wedding collection at the office. She wants everyone to know that she, Jocelyn, is truly female, truly feminine, truly desired, is now to be married and complete.

  She would like Philip as a husband. He is young, suitable, gentlemanly, of good executive stock, smart appearance, and public school background. (He has his job in advertising. He works for Susan’s father after all; he is junior executive at Watson and Belcher.) She knows she loves Philip because she suffers such anxiety when he stays away from her bed on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. On these nights he sleeps at the flat he shares with two rugger-playing friends. Jocelyn thinks his reluctance to commit himself, on any night other than Saturday, is due to Sylvia’s presence in the flat. She feels she cannot bring the subject up.

  ‘Perhaps I’ve been foolish,’ she confides to Helen, who is supposed to know about men. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have agreed to sleep with him. Perhaps now he thinks I’m too awful to marry, and wants a virgin bride or something. He lost interest in Sylvia, didn’t he, quickly enough. But then if I hadn’t, he’d just have found someone else. And anyway, if we hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any relationship at all. I mean, we met in bed, if you see what I mean. London is a terrible place. If we lived at home everyone would know exactly what was happening, and he’d have to marry me. Helen, do you think if I had held out he would have asked me to marry him?’

  ‘I daresay,’ says Helen, who has a low opinion of Philip. ‘But would you then want to marry him? If you have to resort to sexual blackmail to get a man to marry you, he is surely not worth marrying.’

  On the evening before Audrey’s wedding to Paul, Jocelyn leaves the office early to buy a dress. Her looks have improved. Her legs have lost their hockey nobbles. Her waist is agreeably small. Jocelyn cries at Audrey’s wedding. Partly from envy and partly because the brevity of the ceremony upsets her. She is not upset because Audrey is married in the name of Emma. She thinks such devotion to a man is admirable: she predicts a happy future for them. Everyone does.

  When she gets back to her gold-leafed room in the Foreign Office there is a Security reception to see her. Three grey unsmiling men stand beside the dark green tin cupboard in the bathroom. It has been sealed with a blob of red sealing wax the size of a dinner plate, solemnly imprinted with the Foreign Office seal.

  ‘But there was nothing secret in there,’ says Jocelyn.

  ‘That is beside the point,’ they say.

  Jocelyn loses her job. They are sorry to see her go, for seldom has someone worked so hard for so little money, but the rules are the rules.

  Philip, always the gentleman, offers to marry her.

  7 SCARLET SHOWS OFF

  BYZANTIA’S FIRST BIRTHDAY FALLS on a Sunday. Driven by anger, rather than by family feeling, Scarlet takes her child and once again visits Kim and Susan. She does not telephone first. She wants it to be a nice surprise.

  Kim is not at home, and in her heart she is glad. But Susan and Simeon are there, suitably unprotected.

  Byzantia is dark, grubby and bright. Scarlet has dressed her in her shabbiest, most-washed clothes. Byzantia dribbles constantly—she is teething—and her nose runs a lot so that there is one sore reddish patch around her mouth, but in spite of all, Byzantia is beautiful. She is walking well, too.

  Scarlet is glad to see that Simeon, in her eyes a withdrawn and stodgy child, still only crawls. Byzantia has at least a few words to offer the world. Simeon has no desire to converse with anyone. He likes his meals at precise intervals, and his sleeping times to be regular, and that is the sum of his present desire. If his routine is not strictly kept, he is fretful and troublesome. He does not like strange places. He does not like other people. Thus Simeon holds Susan prisoner. She is resigned to her captivity. She devotes her life to looking after him. If Kim wants to go out she says, ‘You know what he’s like with baby-sitters.’ If Kim wants to make love she says, ‘No, Simeon always wakes up at the wrong moment.’ If Kim wants to hold his baby and bounce him, she says, ‘No. You’ll overexcite him and he’ll be sick.
’

  Susan is not happy but she has the consolation of feeling she is in the right. It would be difficult to fault her, and she knows it. She keeps the flat beautifully: she dresses neatly; she cooks from a cookery book and not from memory; she keeps strange cats, strange dogs, strange people, strange germs at bay. These days she does not wander in her secret forests, she has forgotten them. She is the chained magpie. ‘Go on out,’ she screams in her soul, and wakes in the night with an angry fluttering of black wings about her.

  She doesn’t smile much, and she blinks rather a lot. She knows, but she cannot feel, that Kim has a right to share her child, her bed, her home, her life. She wants to push him out, and would be shocked at the very notion.

  Watson and Belcher, Practitioners in Advertising, are prospering, which is as well for Kim, since surely he deserves some pleasure in life. Their offices now occupy six rooms. There is a creative staff of four, led by Kim. He has to work late, and many of his weekends are spent at the office. He refers to his young wife and baby son with affection, and shows photographs of them to his friends in the pub, but rather as if he had to keep reminding himself that they do indeed exist.

  He does not send money to Scarlet. He suggested once to Susan that perhaps he should, but she grew pink in the face and said that if there was any money to spare it should surely go into an Education Policy for Simeon. He agreed with her. He is aware that her distrust of him was born when he took Scarlet in and talked to Wanda, and he feels bad about it.

  His secretary, Alison, however, attracts and distracts him from such dismal thoughts. He devotes much of his emotional energy trying to come to intimate terms with her, without Susan’s father knowing. Not so much because Susan is his daughter—Mr Watson has his own fairly public diversion, a pleasant young designer he first took up with in the Ministry of Food when his wife was in New Zealand and can hardly point a censorious finger—but because this Alison of his is over forty and plain, and Kim feels he has a reputation to keep up.

  He cannot bear, these days, to be alone, idle or sober for long.

  Scarlet drinks the lemon tea which Susan, with barely disguised reluctance, offers her. Byzantia and Simeon sit on the floor and stare at each other.

  ‘Working weekends, is he?’ says Scarlet. ‘He must be raking it in.’ She’s as crude and brash as she can be.

  ‘No,’ says Susan firmly. ‘The agency is going through a tricky time. It’s very new, remember.’

  ‘You understand financial matters, do you?’ says Scarlet, who does, or at any rate could if she put her mind to it, which she won’t. She likes to believe that Susan is not only ill-educated, but stupid. Susan does not reply. Byzantia hits Simeon. Simeon looks bewildered. Susan picks him up, protectively.

  ‘So you called him Simeon, did you,’ remarks Scarlet. ‘Uncle Simeon. Well, it has a dignified ring. They’re just about exactly the same age, aren’t they?’

  Byzantia walks over to her mother and holds out her arms to be picked up. Scarlet obliges. Scarlet knows she is behaving badly, but she can’t stop herself. She is almost physically conscious of the knot of resentment in her chest.

  ‘I see you have a new carpet,’ says Scarlet. ‘Didn’t you like the colour of the other one or something?’

  ‘No,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel angry. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘What did you do with the old one? Give it to the poor?’

  ‘I gave it to the dustmen, if you want to know.’

  ‘Can Byzantia have a biscuit or something?’ asks Scarlet.

  ‘I’d rather she didn’t,’ says Susan coolly. ‘Simeon will see and want one too, and I don’t let him eat between meals.’

  Scarlet looks at Simeon with obvious pity.

  ‘Poor little Simeon,’ she actually says. Susan sits very upright. She is flushed.

  ‘Actually,’ says Scarlet, ‘I clean a carpet like this every day. I go out cleaning when Wanda comes back from school.’

  ‘Cleaning other people’s homes must be quite interesting,’ says Susan eventually. She is taken aback. She sees Scarlet as a lifetime’s burden.

  ‘It isn’t,’ says Scarlet. ‘But what else can I do? There’s no one to help me. I’m quite alone.’

  Susan curls Simeon’s hair into a quiff. She smiles at him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Susan observes, ‘you should have thought of that before. I mean, what did you expect to happen? If you have an illegitimate child it isn’t easy, is it?’

  Scarlet doesn’t reply at first. She too is pink.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she says eventually. ‘If I came and cleaned for you and my father, you might pay me a shilling or so above market rates.’

  ‘We have a daily help already,’ says Susan stiffly.

  Scarlet laughs.

  ‘I was only joking,’ she says. But of course she isn’t. She wants nothing for herself. She is anxious for Byzantia. She is always anxious, these days. Anxious when Byzantia cries, when she has a cold in the nose; paralysed with fear if she runs a temperature; nervous of asking Wanda to baby-sit; alarmed by her own irritation with Byzantia’s grizzles, nappies, fads and habits; terrified (though why should she be?) lest Wanda turn her out and she is left homeless and helpless. She does not feel twenty-one, she feels as old and battered as the hills of the moon.

  Like Jocelyn, she wants to be married. But she is moved by desperation, not ambition. She wants security and respectability. She wants to be looked after. She is tired of being pitied. She wants her dignity back. But who would want to marry Scarlet? She is a mess; she knows it now. Over-weight, spotty, untidy, angry; there is only one thing to be said for her, and that is her devotion to Byzantia, her burden.

  ‘If I was pretty and smart,’ she says suddenly, ‘my father would acknowledge me.’

  ‘He does acknowledge you,’ says Susan, embarrassed. ‘He just can’t afford to keep you. Frankly, I don’t think he sees why he should. Wanda behaved very badly.’

  ‘But I’m me. I’m nothing to do with Wanda.’

  ‘To him you are. You had years when you could have got in touch with him. But coming only when you want something from him …’

  ‘Please try and explain to him—’ but Scarlet’s voice fades away. She knows it is no use.

  ‘See him yourself,’ says Susan.

  ‘No,’ says Scarlet. She has not the heart. Her father, to be frank, frightens and embarrasses her. She is not accustomed to the company of men.

  ‘Can’t the baby’s father help?’ enquires Susan. Scarlet shakes her head. It has at last occurred to her that from Byzantia’s point of view any father is better than none. She has tried to get in touch with the young man responsible, but he has left his bed-sitting room leaving no address—or at any rate none which is available to sad-voiced females.

  She, once so indifferent, now searches Byzantia’s unformed features for traces of this young man; who once took a girl called Scarlet Rider home from a party, spent four hours in bed with her, and then rose, and shaved, and put on a tie, and went to spend Sunday with his fiancée’s parents.

  Not that Scarlet wants him now, not really. Scarlet wants no interference. Scarlet will be father and mother both to her incestuous child—for let there be no mistake about it, and to quote her lady analyst years later, Scarlet, all unknowing, wanted her father’s child. And that is why, in this particular version of events, she is bashful of Kim, and is frightened of Wanda, and why she must now quarrel with Susan on anniversaries.

  She is hardly being reasonable.

  She is causing trouble to everyone.

  No one loves her, not even Wanda, who is bored and tired.

  Only Byzantia looks at her with pure love in her eyes.

  Scarlet snatches up Byzantia and rushes away. Byzantia lets herself be startled and does not complain. Simeon, subjected to similar stress, screams with fright. Scarlet allows herself a second in which she can be seen to sneer. They do not meet again for years.

  Down here among the women, there is a
sour and grim reality about money as Wanda points out.

  So, you choose your degradation, as Scarlet does, and go out scrubbing. So, you lose your purse in Woolworth’s because you want to lose your mother. But you get paid money for scrubbing, and if you leave your purse in Woolworth’s you can’t pay the rent. The bailiffs either come and put you on the streets, or they don’t.

  Scarlet worries about money. Scarlet’s fear is that the State will step in and take away Byzantia, her unlawful child. So, it is free-floating anxiety. So, the Council Homes are full of children whom Children’s Officers feel better qualified than any natural mother to care for.

  Perhaps they are right, thinks Scarlet, staring with despair at Byzantia, as the child shrieks and stamps with joy upon the floor, and the people in the flat below bang with a broom upon their ceiling, and Scarlet, paralysed with depression, knows that presently she will have to confess to Wanda that it has happened again; and even worse, go down and face them and apologize.

  If the people in the flat below complain to the Estate Agents, Scarlet and Byzantia will have to go. There is a ‘no baby’ clause in the lease. And where else will they find to live?

  Scarlet comes out in spots.

  Wanda had the same concerns years and years ago. They bore her now. She looks at her spotty and apathetic daughter, and laments the waste of her own youth, spent nurturing a child who has grown up no better than she.

  ‘The thing about having babies,’ she says sourly, ‘is that you can’t. All you ever have is just more people.’ And from the sound of it she doesn’t much like people.

  All the same, when Scarlet isn’t looking, Wanda croons to Byzantia, and weaves magic to make her smile, and be content, and good. She is better with Byzantia than Scarlet is; but then of course Byzantia expects more of Scarlet, seeing her mother as an extra limb which will do her bidding, and becoming frustrated and furious when it fails to live up to her expectations, or shows it has a will and purpose of its own.

  Wanda earns £10 a week. She worries less about poverty than her daughter, having spent longer with it, and moreover she does not have her daughter’s capacity for running up debts. The rent is £3. 5s. 0d. £3 goes on food. Byzantia, one way and another, costs another £1 a week. Other household expenses, including fares, heating, light and hot water to £4 a week.