Down Among the Women

by Fay Weldon

  Scarlet, working as a cleaner, earns £2. 10s. 0d. a week.

  There is 25/- a week left over for the three of them, after necessities have been met. This ought to be enough, except that Scarlet, to her mother’s rage, will buy lipstick, cigarettes, toys for Byzantia; and Wanda, to Scarlet’s rage, will buy rum.

  Wanda has taken to drink. She has discovered its pleasures late in life. She cannot afford to buy much, but she goes to pubs, leans against bars, and men buy her drinks. She is at her best in pubs. She looks battered, used, available and lively, and in no way a source of reproach, being normally in worse condition than her drinking companions. She builds up quite a pub life. Scarlet is horrified.

  ‘And you a primary school teacher,’ she says. ‘You’ll lose your job if you’re not careful.’

  ‘You can be as drunk as you like,’ Wanda claims. ‘What they can’t stand is politics.’ And she adds gloomily, to frighten Scarlet, ‘Wait until they catch up with that.’

  She is right. Teachers with communist pasts are suspect. Some have already lost their jobs. Supposing they subvert the children? Or indicate that all might not be well with the world? It is not so much political opinion that is feared, as the spirit of restlessness. No one mocks, in 1951. Stalin is not yet dead.

  Wanda is horrified by the way Scarlet goes to parties in a low-cut black sweater and does not return till morning, dusty, tired and bitter.

  ‘Like a cat on the tiles,’ she complains.

  ‘I thought you were all for sexual freedom,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘Not for mothers,’ says Wanda. ‘You’ve had your fling. You should be at home looking after your brat. How can I keep working if I have to get up at two, three, four and five o’clock in the morning?’

  It is true. Byzantia has stopped sleeping through the night. She needs entertainment at more frequent intervals than she does food. She will cry as if pierced by a nappy pin or threatened by a rat until the light goes on and a face appears. Then she will giggle, gurgle and rejoice; and only cry again when the face goes away and darkness returns.

  ‘You grudge me my pleasures,’ says Scarlet. ‘How am I supposed ever to get married if I have to stay at home in this dreary flat? It’s not as if I could ask anyone home. I’d be ashamed.’

  ‘Pleasure!’ says Wanda, who observes that Scarlet’s all-night absences merely increase her depression.

  ‘You think sex is dirty and nasty,’ says Scarlet. ‘You try not to but you can’t help it. That’s why you’re always so crude. It isn’t honesty and frankness, it’s sheer terror.’

  ‘I don’t think sex is dirty and nasty,’ replies Wanda, quick as a flash, ‘I think you are.’

  And it is true that Scarlet begins to feel ingrained, though not so much with dirt as with despair. When she’s not thinking she wants a husband, she’s thinking she needs true love.

  Alas, neither seems available—she herself is the only thing which is. There are more than enough men to go to bed with—and each one she hopes will fall in love with her and save her. She feels she has a great deal to offer. She opens her heart and her soul when she opens her legs; but alas, only the latter are of practical use, and men, she decides in the end—experience reinforcing Wanda’s training—are only interested in practical matters.

  ‘The awful thing is,’ she says to Helen, who drops by one day to visit, ‘if I was morally corrupt, if I was a calculating person, if I played men like fish on a line, if I had had an abortion instead of Byzantia, if I was cold, hard and unfriendly—then I would be pursued by men.’

  ‘To be pursued by men,’ says Helen, casting Scarlet down to depths from which it takes her years to emerge, ‘you have to be beautiful.’

  Helen is both sorry for and irritated by Scarlet. Helen lines her love-nest with silks and downs, plucks the hairs from her legs one by one, learns poetry like a child, and entertains her lover. Y pays the rent, and never calls.

  Scarlet, messing about with old saucepans on an ancient gas stove, serving coffee in cracked mugs, seems to Helen to have abandoned youth, hope and beauty. Scarlet, Helen thinks, can sink no lower. Little does Helen know.

  Jocelyn is giving an engagement party. Scarlet is asked. Scarlet assumes she will be able to go because it is on a Sunday evening, which is the day Wanda holds her Divorcées Anonymous meetings. Thus Byzantia can be safely left at home. On Sunday evening she is disconcerted to see Wanda putting on the brooch which is her one concession to dressing up for an outing.

  ‘Are you going out?’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Wanda.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Is that your concern?’

  ‘But it’s the lady divorcées’ meeting.’

  ‘We’re holding it in the pub,’ says Wanda smugly.

  ‘But I’m going to a party,’ wails Scarlet.

  ‘You’re not,’ says Wanda. ‘You’re going to stay home and look after your baby.’

  Scarlet is in despair.

  ‘They’ll hate it in the pub,’ she claims.

  ‘Why? They say they want men. Pubs are full of men. Drunk, red-nosed, miserable men in old creased trousers, married mostly. Impotent, crude, greasy-necked, smelly, stupid men with swollen bellies—you can hear the beer swilling in their stomachs when they walk, did you know? Let alone when they try to copulate—but men, none the less. They say they want men. Men they shall have.’

  Wanda is irritated by her ladies. She has tried to indicate to them that life without men is possible, even desirable, for women past child-bearing age, and that in fact the sum of human happiness and achievement would be increased by apartheid between the sexes, but still they persist in longing for the company of men; reject lesbianism as a solution to sexual frustration, curl their hair, put on lipstick, and try to look younger than they are. Why? Because they can only seem to exist in relationship with men. Wanda takes them to the pub to punish them and to be disagreeable to her daughter.

  ‘You should have told me,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘What, that you want a cheap baby-sitter?’

  ‘You knew I was going out.’

  ‘I did not. You didn’t ask me.’

  ‘But the card’s been on the mantelpiece for weeks.’

  ‘A card! What kind of a party is it you get asked to by a card? What a funny girl this Jocelyn of yours must be. Does she wear a twin-set and pearls?’

  ‘She’s a bit dull,’ says Scarlet, ‘but she likes to do things the proper way. And what’s more, she asked me.’

  ‘Why, is she sorry for you?’ asks Wanda.

  ‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, ‘she is. She is very sorry for me because I have to live with you.’

  And she stomps off. The relationship between them deteriorates still further. The evening at the pub is disastrous. The membership is embarrassed, leaves early, and thereafter loses its trust in Wanda. Only Lottie remains.

  ‘They don’t really even want men,’ says Wanda in disgust, but cheered because her point is proved. ‘All they want is status. They want to have men to tote round on leads. They’re not unhappy because they’ve lost their husbands. They’re just peeved. How I do despise women.’

  ‘Shall we dress up as men?’ enquires Lottie. ‘I’ve got so thin lately I’m sure I’d pass. And as for you—’ she stops.

  ‘I’ve always been half a man,’ says Wanda. ‘I know. Well, I wish to God I had a wife to clear up after me, that’s all.’

  They don’t dress up as men, of course. Something in them revolts. What? Men’s underpants? Men’s trousers? And the more intimate the two of them become, emotionally, the more careful they are never, never, to touch one another. Wanda speaks badly of Lottie behind her back, but is in fact devoted to her.

  Scarlet gets the better of Wanda by taking Byzantia with her to the party. That means she can’t go home with a man, and has to get the last Underground train home, with a grizzling baby in her arms. She has a sudden panic fear that she will be reported to the Child Welfare Officer for having a child out at such an
hour. She almost wishes now that it will happen. She feels she cannot go on. The craving to live her own life is so strong she imagines she cannot act reasonably any more. She is frightened of damaging Byzantia.

  Jocelyn’s engagement party is remembered for its dullness. Philip has asked his young executive friends, who only talk of cars and salaries. Helen is ashamed to expose her artistic friends to such a bourgeois gathering, and doesn’t even come herself, let alone ask anyone else. Sylvia brings a group of middle-aged Sales and Research Directors, who drink too much and go round fondling the bosoms of the girls, who are respectable in low-cut, tiny-waisted, full dresses, with hair swept back from the face and well curled. Audrey is in Suffolk with Paul and can’t come up—or, as rumour has it, isn’t allowed to. Scarlet, of course, brings her baby, which cries, and depresses the young men with a vision of their future.

  Fatherhood is not yet fashionable. Men are not present at the births of their children, if they can possibly help it. They do not shop, push prams, design the home. Marriage to the unmarried male is a trap, and sex the bait, which by stealth and cunning may yet be won. Poor passive outnumbering middle-class girls do indeed manoeuvre, lure, plot and entice in order to bring men to the altar. Not, of course, Scarlet, ‘Look through the surface of me into my soul,’ she begs of all comers, ‘see what’s there! See how I can love, feel, respond, love, oh love. If you will just accept—’ But why should they bother? Why take the trouble to inspect a dismal soul when there are a myriad glittering surfaces to attend to? Scarlet’s surface does not glitter. Even her low-cut black sweater is dusty: her shoulder-straps dirty.

  Philip cannot stand her, or so he tells Jocelyn. He disapproves of their friendship. Jocelyn—although she sleeps with him on Saturday nights, which he is prepared to overlook—is good wife material, a virgin at heart if not in fact. Scarlet is just a slut.

  Yet he drifts over to talk to her. He tells himself it is because she is Mr Belcher’s daughter—although he must know that a good word put in for him by Scarlet would do him no end of harm.

  She baffles him. She speaks well. She seems to come from the middle-classes; why then does she live the way she does?

  ‘All your men friends are sorry for you,’ observes Scarlet.

  ‘Why?’ he asks, taken aback.

  ‘Entering your life-long prison,’ says Scarlet. ‘Marriage. You’re the first to go.’ She puts on a Welsh voice. ‘Getting married and not pregnant? There’s posh for you!’

  ‘They’re just envious,’ he says.

  ‘No, they’re not.’ What an uncomfortable person she is.

  ‘Of course they are,’ Philip insists. ‘And why not? I’m going to get my meals cooked, aren’t I? Clothes washed. Housework done. The days of discomfort are over.’

  ‘Is that why you’re getting married?’ she asks. ‘Shall I tell Jocelyn?’

  ‘Are you a mischief-maker as well?’ he asks.

  ‘As well as what?’

  He doesn’t reply. He smiles, he looks her up and down in a way he has never regarded Jocelyn. Clean, fastidious, well-mothered as he is, she attracts him. She is, in his eyes, delightfully degraded.

  ‘I’ve got to get a good job,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to earn lots of money, that’s the only way out. Do you know of any?’

  ‘I know a night-club where you could be a cigarette girl,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘Me? Look, I’ve got a brain. I got to University.’

  In his mind he undresses her, baths her, curls her hair, dresses her in long lace stockings, high heels, black corsets, slings a tray beneath her bosom and sends her out selling cigarettes to the rich and lascivious. His fantasies take him no further. His mother steps in, even here, good, smiling, pure and kind, and makes him feel ashamed. He’s only just kept his mother away from this party by the skin of his teeth. It is fortunate that his mother likes Jocelyn. Or is his mother just being good, smiling, pure, kind and polite yet again?

  Scarlet, bored by his silence, which she takes for obtuseness, wanders off, and talks to Sylvia.

  ‘There are two sides to Jocelyn,’ she complains. ‘There’s the conventional side and the human side, and I’m afraid the wrong one is winning. Bed’s one thing, but marriage! He’ll be playing golf on Sundays any minute now.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with sport,’ says Sylvia vaguely. There is a little frown between her eyes. Jocelyn and Philip are going to share the flat. She will, she supposes, have to leave, although it hasn’t been mentioned by the other two. She doesn’t want to think about it. She is, in any case, drinking with Philip’s friend Butch, who is six foot three inches, plays Rugby and works in the sales department of a vacuum cleaning firm. He enjoys her misty-eyed delicacy; and fills her up with gin and bitter lemon. And now she speaks well of sport, which she has been accustomed to despising.

  Butch has a wife, but a disagreeable one. He has had to leave her. He weeps. Sylvia is sad on his behalf. She likes his simplicity. Later on, in bed, she tells him things she has never told anyone else, and barely acknowledges herself. She tells him how she loved a boy at fifteen, and let herself be seduced, and became pregnant, and how her mother took her out of her English literature lesson to have an abortion. She wets his shoulder with her tears, and he comforts her in his lumbering way.

  ‘If I found that boy,’ he says, ‘I’d beat his brains out.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she pleads. ‘It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just something awful that happened.’

  ‘I’d cut his balls off,’ Butch insists. He was born Christopher but is always known as Butch. He is more subtle in his lovemaking than seems likely. He has discovered, all by himself in a world not yet acclimatized to it, the pleasures of oral sex. In the morning they don’t want to leave each other: sit with bodies touching, he such a lumberer, she so delicate.

  Philip nobly warns Butch against Sylvia. She’s fine for an easy lay, he claims, but not the sort to get entangled with. Her morals are weak, along with her eyesight and her hearing. He is glad when Butch sweeps away the warning. It will be easier now to ask Sylvia to leave.

  ‘She’s been a bit upset,’ Butch says. ‘She’s had a bad start. She’s going to be all right now.’

  After the engagement party, Philip gives a stag party. His father offers to pay. Philip’s parents are shadowy figures, even to their son. Philip’s father is gruffly amiable and waves a cheque book to prove his good intent. Philip sees his mother more often in his fantasies than he does in life: she appears ladylike in flowered prints, to damp his ardour and spoil his concentration, and make him feel guilty. In real life she runs the W.I., does Church work, and is always calm and good. He has only once seen her cry. That was when he was sent away to school to be made a man of.

  Philip, made a man of, now gives a stag party. Philip goes to an agency and orders a stripper to add gaiety to the occasion. The agency takes his money but the girl does not turn up. Philip is relieved. The mechanics of the matter have played upon his mind since he made the arrangement. He will have to open the door to this girl, give her instructions, pay her, send her home. How, in a taxi? Supposing she is elderly, scraggy and unpleasant? Expects more than money? Is one of his friend’s sisters? (There is a high-class brothel in South Ken, so they say, where girls from high-class families turn the odd penny. A Guards’ Officer is reputed to have been shown into the room where his sister lay waiting, naked on the bed. ‘Why, Amanda, old girl!’ ‘Why, Jonathan, old chap!’)

  No, the idea of a stripper is far, far preferable to the actuality.

  After the wedding—which takes place in Jocelyn’s village church, with all the trimmings she wished for, except her mother did not cry and her father’s voice was not hoarse, but at least it was too far away for her friends to attend—Philip gets more and more angry with the agency, which he feels has got money from him on false pretences. He threatens to sue. The agency maintain his complaint is against the girl. He sends her a
solicitor’s letter, asking for his money back.

  Jocelyn, casually informed, is aghast. First that he should have wished to employ a stripper; then that he should seek vengeance. He tries to explain.

  ‘But it was my stag party,’ he says, smiling in his remote masculine way. ‘My last fling as a bachelor. I wouldn’t do it now.’

  ‘You’re not a different person,’ she says, ‘just because you’re married.’

  ‘No, but I’ve got to behave now,’ he says. He thinks he is pleasing her. She doesn’t look pleased.

  ‘But what’s the point of watching a strange girl take her clothes off?’ persists poor innocent Jocelyn. ‘I’ll take my clothes off for you.’

  After hockey she and the girls would strip and shower. She was never shy. She always enjoyed her body.

  ‘Take them off then,’ he says, conventionally, but of course she won’t. She is offended by the mysteries attendant upon his desires.

  ‘And you shouldn’t be so vengeful,’ she complains. ‘I don’t understand what is the matter with you.’ And she doesn’t, and neither does he.

  ‘We need every penny we can get,’ he ventures. It is true. They have overspent his income and some of Jocelyn’s capital. They have had the flat painted, and furnished after the style made fashionable by the 1951 exhibition. Jocelyn stalks over green and yellow carpets, wonders why Philip still only makes love on Saturday nights, and then so languidly, and is put in mind—for no reason she can think of other than a general feeling of depression—of Scarlet’s mother’s green and yellow lino. The curtains are brown and yellow; the ceilings pink and the wallpaper patterned with orange geometric designs. Can this be what she meant by it all? Is this the feel, the heart, the texture of married life? She hasn’t the heart to write to Miss Bonny. It even crosses her mind that she could join a team and play hockey on Saturday afternoons while Philip plays Rugby, but she knows in her heart that those times are past, those sources of solace unavailable.