Down Among the Women

by Fay Weldon

  Since X left Y has felt paralysed. If she tries to paint she falls asleep. She has been sleeping with Carl but it does no good. Y plaits Helen’s flowers into a wreath and pins the letter above the gas-stove, and turns it on, and dies, as she has always known she would. She is thirty-five, and feels that life has been going on for a long, long time.

  Helen receives anonymous and non-anonymous letters, blaming her for Y’s death. X is distraught. ‘You came into our lives,’ he says to Helen, ‘and destroyed them. Now you have killed my wife.’ For weeks he is silent, but he does not leave Helen. Nor does he ask her to marry him. ‘Y is my wife,’ he says. ‘You are my destiny. I was born under a fearful star.’ Art-conscious local people ask him round to dinners and parties. Helen is not asked. X goes. Helen, swelling and helpless, stays at home and waits, as Y once did.

  Helen embroiders white linen cloths. She thinks, in her fantasies, she should have been some diplomat’s wife. She could have lived elegantly, in some European capital, and been gracious to important people. She thinks that would suit her. But she knows in her heart that nothing she ever does now will make any difference. Wherever she goes, Y will pad softly along behind, dressed in a white suit, pale and slightly stooping. X writes a monograph about Y’s work.

  Helen rings Jocelyn once, but Jocelyn pretends to be out. Since Y died, Jocelyn thinks Helen is too wicked to be endured. She is grateful yet again for the enduring boredom of her own marriage.

  Helen rings Sylvia, but Sylvia has left home. Butch now lives in their little house with a girl called Rachel. It was Sylvia who first met Rachel in the ante-natal clinic, where the latter was doing research, and brought her home, a plain, stark girl with up-swept horn-rimmed spectacles, a plump figure, hair unfashionably back-combed into a beehive, and a braying laugh. It does not occur to Sylvia that Butch will find Rachel attractive: that her own pale languor now bores, rather than appeals. During this last but successful pregnancy both her hearing and her eyesight have become worse, and she sometimes peers at Butch as if she could not remember who he was.

  Rachel has no such handicap. She looks at hearty, healthy Butch with bright brown alert eyes and challenges his interest, and laughs uproariously when he makes dirty jokes. Sylvia, at such times, just looks bewildered and lady-like, and asks him to say it again. He can’t stand it.

  On the day Butch’s divorce finally comes through he confides in Sylvia that he has been having an affair with Rachel for some months and that he wants to marry her. Sylvia asks Butch to repeat what he said. He hits her hard on the side of the head—the left side, the side of her best ear. Her ear whistles for days, and when it stops, it is because she can hear nothing.

  Sylvia, after a lonely day or two, goes to stay with Jocelyn. When she is gone, Rachel—who has been keeping an eye on the house—moves into it with Butch. So far as Rachel is concerned, Sylvia has been making Butch unhappy, and so deserves whatever she gets.

  Butch and Rachel live happily ever afterwards.

  As for Helen, she types X’s monograph on Y, and waits for her child to be born. X says it is Carl’s child. She knows that it is not.

  12 NICE PEOPLE

  DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN.

  Miss Rogers is a nice person. She helps at the Old People’s Home. She is forty-five and has never married. She walks home across the park, and sometimes joins me on my bench.

  ‘It’s not men’s fault,’ she says to me, quite out of the blue one day.

  ‘What isn’t?’ I ask.

  ‘Women,’ she says. ‘I used to blame men for women’s condition, not now. In the end men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.’ She sighs. She is a handsome, large woman: she wears a bold red coat. I wonder why she has never married. ‘A forty-year-old man has no trouble going off with a twenty-year-old girl,’ she says, as if I had spoken aloud, ‘but who is going to go off with me?’

  ‘You never know,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s too late for me. And don’t think I don’t regret it, because I do.’

  And instead of throwing a pellet of bread in front of a pigeon, she throws it at the unfortunate bird, so it rises into the air with fright.

  ‘I would have liked to have made some man happy,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ I ask, trying to cheer her up. ‘Cook and clean for someone just as able-bodied as you?’ She is such a bold dark clever-looking woman her softness surprises me.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s the whole trouble. One likes to serve.’

  And off she goes, carrying her basket of goodies to her old people, an aged Red Riding Hood with no wolf pursuing.

  Susan goes to visit Wanda. She wears a little hat. She must be the only young woman left in London to do so. Wanda is packing. She is moving yet again. Her new flat will cost ten shillings a week more but there are fewer stairs to climb. Wanda’s legs are beginning to feel their age.

  Susan is surprisingly practical about the green and yellow lino. She levers it up, ignoring the dirt and grime beneath it, and stacks it in piles.

  ‘Scarlet used to do that for me,’ says Wanda. ‘But of course she’s too busy now.’

  ‘What at?’ asks Susan.

  ‘Being kept,’ says Wanda sourly. ‘That girl has the soul of a prostitute.’

  ‘I’m kept too,’ says Susan. ‘I don’t work or anything.’

  ‘Yes, but you pay for it,’ says Wanda, who is almost fond of Susan. ‘You’re married.’ If Wanda has too much to drink she will lurch over to Susan and embrace her. And too much drink, for Wanda these days, is anything to drink at all.

  Susan laughs nervously. She is at a loss to explain her liking for Wanda. She does not tell Kim she visits his former wife—but then she cannot tell Kim much at all, for he is seldom at home.

  Watson and Belcher grow more powerful each year. Kim works hard and late, goes off on location whenever he possibly can, and occasionally dresses Susan up and propels her forward as hostess at some grand party he fancies throwing. He hires an outside caterer, for Susan’s cooking remains New Zealand provincial.

  Kim has a large house now in Windsor, with a staff of five, and a studio specially built for Kim to paint in. There is, indeed, one half-finished painting on the easel. Susan has described it to Wanda, who says it was a painting he started in 1939, and never finished. Certainly, he spends no time there, in his beautiful half-timbered studio, with the cool north light. He never goes to the Oxford Street pub either. He lunches at the Savoy on consommé, grilled steak and salad, and black coffee, or occasionally melon, grilled sole and tomatoes, and black coffee. He watches his waist, and keeps his blood pressure down. He means to live to a hundred, and see his paintings resurrected at the Tate, as a fortune-teller lately implied would happen.

  Susan sees Jocelyn on occasion. Their worlds are similar, and although Susan, as wife of a director, has the social advantage of the wife of a senior executive, Jocelyn does have a university degree, and does design her own home. Kim sees to Susan’s, with the help of the Art Department. Susan feels inadequate.

  ‘Do you remember Sylvia?’ Susan asks Wanda. ‘She is staying with Jocelyn. She is pregnant and deaf, and her boyfriend wouldn’t marry her.’

  ‘You sound quite jealous,’ says Wanda, and it is true. Susan would be glad of anything that actually happened. Her life is empty of events.

  ‘Philip used to fancy Sylvia,’ says Susan. ‘In fact Jocelyn took her away from him. I think it’s risky, don’t you, having her in the house now?’

  (Philip, actually, can hardly bear to look at Sylvia. He scarcely recognizes this swollen, distressed woman as the vague and lissom Sylvia he still, from time to time, has dreams about, and in which his mother always interferes.)

  ‘I wish you could have more normal friends,’ he complains to Jocelyn. ‘It doesn’t reflect well on you.’

  ‘At least,’ says Jocelyn, ‘I have friends.’ It is a sharp and unkind remark. She makes them quite o
ften, these days. It is true, too. Philip finds himself friendless. He has colleagues, with whom he is on good enough terms, but he suspects they regard him as square and dull. He has outgrown his former Rugby friends, who work in insurance or in the seedier branches of industry. It is not that he feels he is too smart and sophisticated for them; but that they feel inadequate. The more he buys the drinks, the less at ease they are.

  Jocelyn makes him more uneasy than ever. She has become astringent of tongue, and she is pregnant. He regards her bulky body with fear, as something unknowable.

  ‘What a guilty thing you are,’ says Wanda to Susan. ‘Always expecting punishment. Only the good get punished and I shouldn’t think Philip was a good person. Dull, yes. Good, no.’

  ‘I don’t know how Jocelyn stands it,’ says Susan. ‘Philip kisses my hand at parties, and he has such a limp, clammy hand. And at the same time he manages to leer. I get leered at quite a lot, of course, being married to someone so much older, but Philip does it more than most.’

  ‘You talk as if marriage was something that happened to you. Not something you’d done.’

  ‘That’s what it feels like,’ complains Susan. ‘I was too young. They should have stopped me.’

  ‘They!’ sneers Wanda. ‘They! Where is this mysterious They? The closest I ever got to They was Scarlet’s Edwin and look what happened there.’

  ‘Poor Scarlet,’ says Susan. ‘I wish she liked me more. I went all the way down to Lee Green to rescue her and still she doesn’t like me. I’ve only ever wished her well.’

  ‘You’ve kept her away from Kim,’ says Wanda.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Susan, shocked. ‘Never. I am his daughter.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asks Wanda.

  ‘I said she is his daughter,’ says Susan.

  Wanda sighs and does not pursue the matter. Susan, however, does.

  ‘I think it’s unfair to say I kept Scarlet away. She’s been welcome to come at any time. Good God, she even had her child in my bed. Was that keeping her away?’

  Wanda says nothing.

  ‘It wouldn’t have helped her to have given her money,’ says Susan. ‘People must learn to stand on their own feet.’

  ‘Do shut up, you silly little bitch,’ says Wanda, ‘and help me pack. It’s all you’re fit for.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ says Susan, with dignity, but she does as she is told. She even asks Scarlet round to dinner.

  Scarlet telephones her mother in panic.

  ‘I’ve nothing to wear,’ she says. ‘Can you give me some money?’

  ‘Ask your boyfriend,’ says Wanda.

  ‘He has his wife to support, he can’t. And I can’t wear cheap clothes any more. I’m such a funny shape, cheap clothes always look strange on me.’

  ‘Then go naked.’

  ‘How very unhelpful you are,’ says Scarlet, all hoity-toity. ‘I look worse naked. Deformed. It’s your fault. You should have put me in a plaster cast when I was a baby.’

  ‘I did,’ says Wanda. ‘You were born with a dislocated hip. You were in a cast until you were nine months.’

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘It was something I did not wish to remember. What would you have felt like if Byzantia had been born deformed?’

  ‘A dislocated hip isn’t deformed.’

  ‘No? That’s not what your father said. He could paint nudes with toe-nails growing out of their ears but one baby with a dislocated hip and he went to pieces. He hardly ever came home for six months, he’d never touch you or pick you up, and I never trusted him after that. That’s why I left.’

  ‘I thought you left because you disapproved of his paintings.’

  ‘That as well. But the initial disappointment started with you.’ And Wanda laughs. It is quite like old times.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a laughing matter,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘Neither do I,’ says Wanda, trying to take the top out of the gin bottle with her teeth, because she has the telephone receiver in one hand.

  But she only succeeds in hurting her teeth, so she replaces the receiver and concentrates on the gin.

  Susan has dinner laid for three in the morning room, which is chintzy and informal.

  ‘We should eat in the dining-room,’ says Kim. ‘Or do you want to palm her off with second-best?’

  Susan is taken aback by such aggression. Kim is normally polite to the point of indifference.

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ she says. ‘I just thought it would be more homey in the morning-room.’

  ‘I think she would see it as an insult,’ says Kim, staring at her with hard, bright, elderly eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asks, bewildered. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Deprived me of a family,’ he says. She cries, from the surprise, the injustice, of such a sudden accusation. He comforts her, automatically, but without interest. She wonders if he is ill; the thought that he might be makes her angry. It is his function to look after her. For what other reason has she endured all these years? She shuts her eyes.

  And lo, her kauri forest springs up around her: wraps her once again in its dark protective silence. It has not been lost: it has been hiding: too dark and powerful ever to dissolve. She takes her time amongst the massive trunks; she brushes the creeper ropes aside; she listens to the silence; she is a child again. She opens her eyes. She smiles remotely at Kim, and rings for the maid, and has dinner re-set in the dining-room, on the vast mahogany table beneath the chandelier.

  ‘Are you better now?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says. But she does not care. He is nothing to do with her. He never has been. He is Scarlet’s father, Byzantia’s grandfather, Wanda’s husband. He has acknowledged it, and so can she. She has her inner life back again.

  Scarlet arrives. She is dressed in orange silk; she is charming, almost soignée; she is slim and entertaining. Her shoes are not cleaned and her stockings are laddered, as if she had lost interest in herself at knee-level, but—so long as she is sitting—she reflects credit on her father. He is impressed. They talk, laugh, confide.

  Susan feels dull, stodgy, and isolated. She sits in the highly-polished, glittering world she has created. Each pendant of the chandelier above has been washed and polished. Upstairs in cedar chests are folded snowy sheets and pillowcases, thick towels and blankets. In the kitchen all is order and cleanliness. In the garden not a weed shows more than half-an-inch high. Simeon sleeps dutifully, with clean face and fingernails in pyjamas fresh as today. None of it comforts her.

  She can see her face in the mirror. Her eyes are beginning to pop slightly, as her mother’s did. She hopes and believes that Kim has not noticed.

  ‘Perhaps I should go and live with Wanda,’ she says, ‘and Scarlet could come and live here,’ but she must have spoken very softly, for no one hears. She is relieved, on reflection, that they do not.

  ‘I have given up complaining and reproaching,’ says Scarlet, after several glasses of good red wine. ‘It takes up too much energy. I have a lot to be getting on with and life is short.’

  ‘It has taken you a long time to get round to it,’ says Kim, who has had not only wine but nearly half a bottle of whisky, as well as a prawn cocktail in a brandy glass, roast chicken, with stuffing and bread sauce, roast potatoes and green peas, and a peach melba. Sometimes he thinks he will offer Susan cookery lessons at the Cordon Bleu, but fears her eyes will pop even more than they do already.

  ‘You can’t accuse me of making a nuisance of myself,’ says Scarlet. ‘For a daughter, I keep myself very much to myself.’

  ‘Your entire life so far,’ he complains, ‘has been a not very subtle reproach to me.’

  ‘Or to Wanda,’ says Susan, but they ignore her. Is it, she begins to wonder, that she speaks softly, or is it that they have blotted her out of their minds?

  ‘I came to you once,’ says Scarlet, ‘to ask you what was to become of me.’

  ‘What did I say?’
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  ‘I had Byzantia, and never got round to it. Perhaps that was answer enough.’

  ‘In my bed,’ says Susan.

  ‘Our bed,’ says Kim, hearing her, but not looking at her. ‘These days, being the gentry, we have separate rooms, with adjoining bath.’

  ‘You’ve never supported me,’ says Scarlet. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have had Susan to support,’ says Kim. ‘And of course Simeon.’ Though he has difficulty in remembering that he has a son.

  ‘But if you like,’ says Kim, ‘I will make you an allowance now.’

  ‘I don’t need it now,’ says Scarlet. ‘I live in sin with a solicitor. In any case, I am sure Susan would object. I have very few needs; Alec pays the rent, and the State pays for my analysis.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can stand it,’ says Susan. ‘People messing about in your mind. All this turning inwards! It just makes people self-absorbed and selfish. What good has it done you?’

  ‘I am sitting here at this table,’ says Scarlet, ‘behaving really quite well, and even believing that you’re both human.’

  ‘Charming!’ says Susan.

  Kim drives Scarlet home in his new Bentley. He feels, for all the gleaming metal around him, that he is a shadow of what he might have been.

  ‘When your mother left me,’ he says, ‘she took something away from me. I wasn’t sorry to see it go at the time, but I think it was a pity.’

  ‘Shall I tell her so?’ asks Scarlet. ‘She’d be pleased.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It is too late. We are both too old. The future, for both of us, has become a thing of the past.’

  He drives silently for a while. He feels himself to be a ridiculous elderly man, wearing too-tight purple trousers and a lambswool sweater. He does not understand how it has happened. He is accustomed to being young. And is this his daughter? Scarlet, his baby, lying in her awkward plaster cast, limbs akimbo! Did she really grow into this? In his mind, time becomes confused.

  ‘You should have gone into hospital to have the baby,’ he mumbles, mistaking Scarlet for Wanda. ‘You’re very obstinate. You didn’t really know better than the doctors, you see. You’re not as tough as you think you are. Now see what you’ve done to her.’