Down Among the Women

by Fay Weldon

  ‘What did you say?’ asks Scarlet, puzzled, and he shakes his head like a seal out of water and regains his sense of the present.

  ‘I’m working too hard,’ he says. ‘It’s all these dependants.’

  ‘What are you working hard on?’ asks Scarlet. ‘Toilet paper?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he says.

  ‘What an asset you are to the community,’ she says. ‘All those nice clean bums, all thanks to you.’

  ‘You are like your mother,’ he says. ‘It’s not surprising I get confused.’

  It is impossible, he thinks, when he returns to Susan, to make everyone happy. All the same he tries. Susan sulks for twenty-four hours, and then, surprisingly, allows him to make love to her. Kim dies suddenly and painlessly, in mid-intercourse. It has always been his fear—the pounding of the heart, the soaring of the senses, the high spasm of nothingness—supposing the spirit goes so far it does not return?

  Well. It does not return on this particular evening. He dies as he has lived, unburdened, and perhaps more appropriately in Susan’s arms than in Alison’s.

  The day after she dines with her father, Scarlet fills in an application form for a place in the London School of Economics. She even posts it.

  ‘You might almost say,’ she says to Alec, ‘that I have grown up. And that’s another thing—out!!’

  ‘Who?’ he asks, looking round.

  ‘You,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’ he is surprised, if not really upset.

  ‘Your wife is a nice woman,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘So are you,’ says Alec. ‘Anyway how do you know what my wife is like? You have never met her. You and I are doing no one any harm. All we do is add to the sum of human happiness.’

  ‘We are doing me harm,’ says Scarlet. ‘I want a proper husband of my own age, and some more children; I’m fed up with other women’s left-overs.’

  ‘Oh, charming,’ he says. ‘Charming. I don’t think you have the temperament for marriage. I am sorry for your ex-husband. You have no sense of humour.’

  ‘Get out,’ says Scarlet, made more furious by this than any other insult he has ever offered her. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Very well,’ he says, lingering. ‘Ring me at the office when you change your mind.’

  ‘Supposing I rang you at your home?’ she enquires.

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ he says. ‘In any case you don’t know the number. You are being very rash. Supposing you don’t find anyone to marry you? The world is full of unmarried women. I might just be a fluke, a flash in the pan.’

  ‘I am a divorced woman,’ says Scarlet, ‘and statistically that is a good sign. We tend to remarry.’

  ‘I shall miss you,’ says Alec. ‘When I first saw you in that car I thought you were some dismal daughter out with her father. Then I saw you snarling and knew no daughter ever snarled at a father like that. That was marriage, that was. Then you heaved over into the back seat showing a lot of suspender and nice white thighs, and I fancied it, married or not. Nice unused thigh, Scarlet. I made good use of it.’

  ‘Oh, get out,’ says Scarlet, sadly enough. ‘It won’t work any more. I’m not a naughty little girl. I’m a grown woman. Good-day.’

  The next day Wanda phones Scarlet, in tears, to tell her that Kim has died. Scarlet rings Alec, at the office, and cries. He comes round at once and comforts her, and admits he has been making up his wife, and asks her to marry him.

  ‘It is like a happy ending,’ Scarlet complains to Jocelyn, later. ‘Kim dies and everything comes right. Was he really such a villain? I had stopped hating him; now I am forced to wonder again. He had seemed, lately, so little worth hating. Just an elderly, ordinary man, with a rather simple nature; a rather vain person, wearing trousers too young for him. A little boy, showing off his smart house and his shiny car. What a lot of my life I have wasted spiting him; and when I wasn’t spiting him, worshipping him like the graven image he always was in my mind, with a painting done in 1939 in one sculpted hand, and the other pinching Susan’s bottom. Sculpted flat, not three-dimensional, I may say, like the Elgin marbles. All the same, I am glad we parted on good terms.’

  Kim’s house, of course, is not paid for. Neither is the Rolls. He has not paid a household bill for, it appears, five years. He has only one insurance policy, the rewards of which he had transferred, only the day before he died, from Susan his wife to Scarlet his daughter. A cheque for £8,532 is brought round to Scarlet within an hour of news of his death. Susan does not quibble. She has not the energy.

  Official auditors and executors move in. The house is sold to meet bills. Susan takes the flat below Wanda’s. Simeon is taken from his prep school and goes to the local school: he is bullied for a time, but only until his accent loses its eccentricity and he becomes like all the others. He is happier for it. His dull eyes become quite bright. So do Susan’s, being daughter, wife and mother to Wanda. She gets a job as a shorthand typist. Her life begins. Her eyes stop popping.

  Some six months after Kim’s death Susan has a nervous telephone call from a woman called Alison. She says she is Kim’s ex-secretary. She has in her possession some fifty paintings done by Kim over the past eight years. What should she do with them? Wanda goes, on Susan’s behalf, to inspect the paintings.

  Alison is fifty; a grey-haired, plain, peaceful, stoical woman. Kim has been visiting her daily for years: to paint, to talk, to make love. She has asked for nothing better. She has never wished to marry. But she had thought perhaps Susan was entitled to the paintings.

  ‘You mean,’ says Wanda, ‘you wanted to make your presence felt.’

  But she knows it is not true. Alison is not like that. Alison is a pleasant woman and simply wishes to be obliging. Wanda has never felt more at a disadvantage. The paintings, she suspects, are very good indeed. She leaves them with Alison, who has no idea, one way or the other, of their quality, and who in the end puts them in the Methodist Jumble Sale.

  13 SOLUTIONS

  DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN.

  Let us now praise fallen women—those of them at any rate who did not choose to fall, but were pushed and never rose again.

  Let us praise, for example, truckloads of young Cairo girls, ferried in for the use of the troops, crammed into catacombs beneath the desert floor. More crowded even than Paul’s battery hens, as plucked of fine feathers and as raw of breast, and even more diseased. Where is their Ministry of Agriculture official, where their vet, where their Marketing Board? Where are their post-war treats; their grants, their demob suits, their cheering crowds? Come re-union day, where have they gone? Lost to syphilis, death or drudgery. Those girls, other girls, scooped up from all the great cities of East and West, Cairo, Saigon, Berlin, Rome. Where are their memorials? Where are they remembered, prayed for, honoured? Didn’t they do their bit?

  Let us now raise a monument in the heart of the London Stock Exchange. Let us call it the Tomb of the Unknown Whore. Let the Queen pay homage once a year. Whose side is she on, anyway? The men have taken the top-of-the-milk, and left us with whey for our cornflakes.

  So at any rate says Helen, when Scarlet calls to visit her, to show off her wedding ring and photographs of beautiful Byzantia.

  X is having an affair with the wife of a neighbour. Her name is Barbara. He does not trouble to hide it from Helen. He paints Barbara naked, and takes Barbara, not Helen, to Private Views.

  When Helen protests all he can say is ‘Now you know what Y felt like. Stay quiet and put up with it, as you expected her to do.’

  ‘Do you want me to die too?’ asks Helen.

  ‘That’s up to you,’ he says. ‘You carry death with you, in any case. I knew that, from the moment I first saw you.’

  Helen, looking at herself in the mirror, sees that he is right. When X is away at night, and the blackness of the country closes round the cottage, and the silence mounts, it is death she hears creaking the floorboards and the beams, and death who rustles the leaves against the windows. She is fri
ghtened now of the supernatural, as she has never been frightened of anything alive. She will pick the baby Alice out of its crib and sit rocking it against her breast hour after hour, and then become frightened to even pull back the shawl and look at her child, in case it stares back with Y’s eyes, suckles with Y’s mouth.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ she asks X.

  ‘No,’ he replies, and falls silent again.

  ‘I can’t live like this,’ she tells him.

  ‘You must live as you wish,’ he replies. ‘It is nothing to do with me. We are bound together by Y’s death. It is not up to me to break those ties.’

  ‘It is your fault as much as mine,’ she says, and he laughs, loudly and shockingly, at the absurdity of such a notion. They both accept that it is not true. Y’s death is established as Helen’s fault.

  X thinks that Helen is turning from a domestic into a wild animal. She has become gaunt: her lips stretch back over teeth that seem too large: the whites of her eyes show unnaturally. She seems to him to lurk in dark corners, embodiment of all reproach. She is his punishment. He will not turn her away for fear of something worse.

  He is fearful of Alice, who mews and suckles like a little animal. She too is monstrous, he thinks, with her tiny, blind, searching head. He has relief only when he is with his Barbara, whom he sees as a calm, pleasant, stupid woman. She has no imagination. To her a table is a table, a death is a death. Barbara disapproves of Helen, and believes in saying what she thinks.

  ‘She is a femme fatale, that’s all,’ says Barbara. ‘One day you will grow out of her, and you will stop feeling so depressed. In the meantime, of course, you are painting beautifully. Perhaps the strain is good for you?’

  Barbara does not really want the situation altered. Why should she? She has such status now as she has never dreamt of. A successful farmer for a husband, and a famous artist for a lover, and the black beast Helen, snarling in her corner, defeated.

  ‘You can’t stay,’ says Scarlet to Helen, for tales of Barbara have drifted back to London. Helen is still seen as the witch woman, but Scarlet is now on Helen’s side. ‘You must leave. There are more men in the world.’

  ‘Things may get better,’ says Helen. She is wearing what seems like many chiffon scarves. When she moves, she drifts in a waft of fabrics. They flutter round her strong, bony, tough-skinned face. She has become very thin.

  ‘You are fixated on that man,’ says Scarlet, ‘and what is he? Just another man.’

  ‘He has become my life,’ says Helen. ‘I have invested everything of me in him. I have nothing left but him.’

  ‘Well,’ says Scarlet briskly, ‘I am not in love with him, and see him quite clearly. He is self-indulgent, conceited, sadistic, and as neurotic as all get out. None of it’s real.’

  ‘Y dying was real,’ says Helen. ‘I saw the certificate. In fact, do you know, I registered the death. No one else could bring themselves to do a sordid thing like that. I always have to do the dirty work, the same as I have to deal with Y’s ghost. While he’s off having a good time somewhere else.’

  ‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘I can’t leave him,’ Helen repeats. ‘He is my existence. Anyway, I can’t until he asks me to go. He may need me. I inspire him, I always have. His work is more important than my feelings.’

  X comes home and ignores Scarlet, except to nod curtly to her as he passes through the living-room to his bedroom. He shuts the door firmly.

  ‘He is not inspired,’ says Scarlet, ‘he is mad. I’ve been mad in my time, so I can tell. You’ve been a bit odd, but never mad. You owe him nothing. For Alice’s sake, get out. You are a mother now, not a woman. What kind of a father is he to her?’

  There was a time when Scarlet never used to interfere in other people’s lives. As she gets older she realizes more and more that she knows best.

  ‘Where would I go?’ asks Helen. ‘How would I live? I have never been without a man. I have always been someone’s mistress. It will not suit me to be an unmarried mother.’

  ‘I was one of those too,’ says Scarlet, ‘and every year it gets easier.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ says Helen, helplessly. ‘I have never been responsible for anyone except myself. I can’t start now. I can’t do anything new. Only the same as I did yesterday.’ Scarlet is shocked by the change in Helen. ‘You’re like someone in prison,’ she says. ‘You’ll die if you stay.’

  ‘All my family died in prison,’ is all Helen will say. ‘Mother, father, aunts, uncles. My sister. Why should I be different? I don’t mind dying, or prison. Better late than never. Off to the great kibbutz in the sky.’

  Scarlet wants to slap her. ‘I was joking,’ says Helen feebly.

  ‘Give me Alice,’ says Scarlet. ‘Go on being as wicked as you like, but let me save Alice.’

  ‘There is no saving her,’ says Helen smartly. ‘She is doomed, she is female … What’s more,’ Helen adds dismally, ‘she is mine.’

  And she sinks again into lethargy, sitting slumped in her chair. She raises her hand and points.

  ‘Here she is,’ says Helen. ‘Here comes Y.’

  And Scarlet goes quite cold, because it is true that a pale stooping figure is coming up the drive. It is only the girl who delivers the milk, as Helen must surely know, for the milk is delivered at the same time every evening.

  Scarlet takes it upon herself to knock upon X’s door, go in, and tell him that Helen needs a doctor as she is having a nervous breakdown.

  ‘A doctor?’ enquires X, apparently bemused. Then he laughs and says, ‘We don’t need doctors. We need priests. We will exorcise her.’

  And as if on cue he leaves the bed on which he lies and broods, and strides off to the local library, where he is a celebrity, in search of a book on exorcism.

  ‘Look here,’ says Scarlet to Helen, ‘he is going too far. Are you just going to sit here and be exorcised?’

  ‘Not in such a cut-price fashion,’ says Helen, with what seems like returning spirit. ‘Not by him. Am I not even worth a priest? Who does he think he is?’

  ‘Come to London with me,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘No one will talk to me in London,’ says Helen. ‘They blame me.’

  ‘It may surprise you,’ says Scarlet, ‘but there are at least fifty million people in the country who have not heard of X, Y or you.’

  ‘I am so old,’ says Helen. ‘Old as death. No one will want me.’

  Scarlet takes Helen’s bony hands in hers.

  ‘Y once stroked my hair and brought me back to life,’ says Helen. ‘I do not think that you can do the same for me.’

  All the same she allows her hand to remain in Scarlet’s, and gazes at it fixedly. And Scarlet, conscious of her own years in the darkness, tries to transmit, by simple touch, some of her own harshly-acquired strength. Scarlet is generous. She wishes to share. She is prepared to give at least a portion of her own happiness away. And it is, indeed, as if the dark tide begins to recede from Helen’s brain as she holds Scarlet’s hand. Her mouth, which has been so tautly held, relaxes into what is almost a smile.

  (‘I made death leave her,’ says Scarlet to Jocelyn later, ‘just for a little.’ And Jocelyn nods politely, rather embarrassed, and thinks, but does not say, what many other people also think, that if only Scarlet had left Helen alone, matters might have been a good deal better.)

  ‘All right,’ says Helen, unexpectedly. ‘I shall come to London. Quick, quick. We must be gone before he comes back. He will kill us.’

  And she runs up the narrow staircase to her room, and starts gathering her things together, quickly, quickly. Scarlet helps. How white the linen, how fragile the underwear; how Helen’s fingers caress and care for them, automatically, even in this extremity of fright. For now Helen has decided to go, her fear of X is sudden and extreme. For their very lives, it seems, they must be gone before he returns.

  Scarlet wonders for a disconcerting moment whether Helen intends to lea
ve the baby, but Scarlet has misjudged her friend. Helen stops to scoop up Alice as she leaves; wraps her in a snowy-white, beautifully washed shawl. Now they half-walk, half-run, over ploughed fields towards the station. Their shoes are clogged with mud.

  Scarlet does not dare look back, for fear of seeing X looming on the skyline; she has invested him, in the space of just ten minutes, with supernatural powers. Threading through her fear is a vein of excitement. She is running away again. She has always run away, and always found it exhilarating. There has always been, with Wanda, a new school, a new father, a new flat to run to; later a new man, a new baby, a new life. Every new event ensures a host of old ones thrown out, run away from, left undone. She remembers what it felt like to be a naughty little girl; excited by disaster and her own wilfulness.

  And here she is, a grown woman, stumbling through muddy fields, still at it.

  ‘Nothing changes much in life,’ Scarlet observes, panting.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ says Helen. ‘It is too depressing a thought.’ The station is in sight. Sanity returns. They walk demurely now. Helen nods graciously to the villagers, who stare back, either in non-comprehension, or in unabashed hostility.

  ‘I very much hope that change is possible,’ says Helen. ‘I have spent my life so far amongst enemies. As a child I was hated and feared as an enemy alien. Later I grew beautiful and was disliked for that. Then I loved too fixedly—and people don’t like such constancy, it frightens them. It indicates there is a purpose and a doom, a plan beneath the chaos. It is too strong a concept for ordinary people, who can only love for a minute at a time.’

  ‘Like me,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘There are excuses for you,’ says Helen, charitably. ‘You have difficulty surviving.’

  On the train she chatters about the fate of women, plans a tomb to the Unknown Whore, and says she will set herself up as a painter of portraits.