by Fay Weldon
‘I would not have gone back then for all the world. I remembered you, Scarlet, telling me about the man you sold yourself to for a pair of stockings; it had entered into my fantasies. Is it because we are English that we are all so masochistic? Do the French, the Italians, the Americans, yearn for degradation? I wanted to know what it was like to make the fantasy real; to discover whether—in the same way that fiction is so much more satisfactory than real life, having a beginning, a middle, an end, and a point—the fantasy is not more fulfilling than the fact.
‘He had to push me along the corridor, just the same. He knocked on the door of Room 541, and opened it. His client was lying on the bed; he was about forty-five, I suppose, with a city pallor, a flat face, square jaw, rimless glasses, close-cropped hair; I felt I had seen ten thousand men just like him before.
‘ “Hi,” he said. He was very amiable. “Philip, glad to see you. What a lonely city this is. But all large cities are the same, aren’t they? All I ever want to do is stay at home, and sit in the garden with the wife and kids, and grow beans. But no, life isn’t like that.”
‘ “This is Una,” said Philip.
‘ “Hi, Una,” said Mr Rigby, and after that ignored me. “Like a drink, Philip?”
‘Philip, to my alarm, accepted. I had thought he would leave at once. Mr Rigby poured himself and Philip a drink and did not offer me one. I sat on a hard chair in the corner.
‘You know what it’s like in hospital, when you’re ill, or having a baby, and you become de-personalized, and just a body, to be directed here and there, and ministered to, and hurt or healed as luck and the institution will have it. All sense of personal identity goes. That’s what I felt like, sitting in my corner, waiting.
‘They talked about marketing. After about quarter of an hour, Mr Rigby directed a gracious word to me.
‘ “Take your raincoat off, Una,” he said. “You look a bit hot. These hotels are always stuffy.”
‘Philip crossed and took off my raincoat. I sat down again, knees together.
‘Mr Rigby smiled, and asked me to take off bra and pants.
‘ “Una a friend of yours?” he asked Philip, when I had done so, and had sat down again, as one does in the cubicle of outpatients, only without the towelling gown, of course.
‘ “Yes,” said Philip. “On and off.” I wished he would go. I did not like waiting. I was having trouble breathing. They continued to talk about market research and the tragedy of the research-orientated society, in which nothing new can happen, but only what is known repeated.
‘ “Mankind is on a pollution binge,” said Mr Rigby. “He pollutes his outer world with chemicals, and his inner world with research.”
‘ “I tell you what,” said Mr Rigby, eventually. “I’ve got a feeling I’m getting ’flu, like everyone else. Supposing you stay and make the most of Una here. It would be a pity to waste her.”
‘I cannot be so disagreeable as I sometimes think, because my first concern was for Philip. I thought, he will acquit himself badly. He will be impotent, he will be despised, he will lose the account. We will be bankrupt. I need not have worried. Under Mr Rigby’s observing eye, according to Mr Rigby’s specification, Philip behaved like a sexual athlete in a schoolboy’s dream, taking me—and I say taking, because that is what it felt like—this way and that, using hands, mouth, penis in a complex pattern worked out beforehand, I imagine, by Mr Rigby’s research-conscious brain, until indeed I was transposed, for the first time, into that other black, tumultuous parallel universe, where I had never been before. Mr Rigby’s smiling and observing face loomed through it, however, and he seemed the familiar one, and Philip was the stranger.
‘After they had finished and I was replaced upon my chair, and the waiter had brought coffee, which—allowed for this purpose at least to be something more than animal—I was asked to pour, and Philip and Mr Rigby were going through a folder of research statistics, it came to me that of course this was the normal pattern of events in an evening with Philip and Mr Rigby. But why had Philip wanted it to be me, when so often it had been other women? To reduce me to the level of the others, to vilify me, to demonstrate to me my proper function in the world? Did he really need so badly to humiliate me? Was his revenge so important? Or was it just to prove to me that given the right circumstances he could be as potent as the next man? Or perhaps, Scarlet, he just fancied me? Perhaps men are as simple as that?’
‘Why, come to that,’ says Scarlet, ‘did you go along with him in the first place? What kind of revenge was that?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I just don’t know. It was the end of our marriage. We limped along together, returned to our separate beds, for a month or so. I could not forgive him, yet I did not know what I had to forgive him for. It was my doing as much as his. Yet, because he was my husband, I had expected him to save me from myself. But why should he? I remind myself of Edward in a rage, hitting another three-year-old on the head and shrieking “Be my friend!”
‘Edward. That was the other thing. The accident I’d been working up to. All those accidents, like one’s life, becoming less funny and more bitter as time goes on. I was bathing him, and forgot to put the cold water in, and lowered him into scalding water. There is, of course, no such thing as an accident. I did it on purpose to my child, because he looked like Philip.’
‘He doesn’t look in the least like Philip,’ says Scarlet. ‘Or not much, anyway.’
‘I stayed with him in hospital. I would have died myself to save him the pain. Yet it wasn’t love. It was the maternal instinct. There is no credit in that. It’s just another kind of animal thing.’
‘Is there credit in love?’ asks Scarlet.
‘Well, more,’ says Jocelyn, ‘if not much. Anyway, sitting beside his bed I envied Helen for the first and last time in my life. He was going to have those scars for ever, and I was going to have to live with him, and there was to be no more escape.’
‘The scars hardly show,’ says Scarlet. ‘You don’t notice them at all.’
‘I do,’ says Jocelyn. ‘All other feelings are luxuries, you know. Love, hate, lust, despair, hope—once one is a mother one has no business feeling any of them. They are inappropriate to one’s state. All the same, within a couple of weeks of Edward leaving hospital, I met and was in bed with Ben. I knew by then, thanks to Mr Rigby, that there are other universes to inhabit, and that I was really just like any other woman, and deserved as much and as little; and once I knew that, all kinds of reasonable, sensible things became possible.’
Down Among the Women
MY NAME IS JOCELYN. I sit in the park and consider the past, and what became of us all, and how little the present accords with our expectations of it. Hockey One, Hockey Two, Hockey Three and away! Oh, Miss Bonny, you and I, running for the bus and laughing, crackling over the winter ground. You and I, caught up for ever and ever in our moment of time, like flies trapped in amber.
Edward is over at the swings now, with little Sylvia, who is my favourite child. I can pick him out—he wears a red woollen cap which Audrey knitted for him in her domestic days—it was far too big then; it fits now, five years later. Perhaps Scarlet is right, and it is only to me that his scars seem so disfiguring? Perhaps he could stay at home, not go away to school, and I could abandon my last pretensions to gentility? I could hand Philip back the school fees and stop trying to get all I can out of him. Perhaps the next time Edward comes homing in to me and stares at me in his absent way and smoothes my hair away from my face as he talks, I will not have to push him away, or tell him he’s a big boy now. Perhaps I will just be able to sit, and accept.
There, I did it. I put my arm round him and smiled, and he smiled back. Every day he looks less and less like Philip—except of course when he’s in a bad temper. And that isn’t really so often.
One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.
I sit like a Roman matron, my cloak around my Edward and my Syl
via, and stare out into the dissolving universe. It’s getting dark. Soon it will be time to go home, and I will cook dinner, like all the other women in the world—at least to date.
For let me report a conversation I overheard between Scarlet and her Byzantia. I do not see Byzantia cooking dinner.
Byzantia, kind Byzantia, throws a party for her mother’s friends, for whom she has a weakness. She does not offer them marijuana, explaining to Scarlet that she considers them too unstable.
‘They would have bad trips,’ she says. ‘All lows, no highs.’
‘Perhaps so will you, at our age,’ says her mother.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Byzantia.
‘We haven’t done too badly,’ pleads Scarlet. ‘There’s me with Alec, Jocelyn here with her Ben, Sylvia with her Peter, and I daresay Audrey will bring her Editor, if she thinks he’ll have a bad enough time. And even your step-grandmother Susan will be able to bring your uncle Simeon.’
‘You amaze me,’ says Byzantia. ‘Fancy seeing success in terms of men. How trivial, with the world in the state it’s in.’
‘Merely as a symbol of success,’ pleads Scarlet, ‘I don’t mean to offer it as the cause.’
‘A symptom more like,’ says Byzantia, ‘of a fearful disease from which you all suffered. One of you even died on the way. I think the mortality rate is too high.’
When asked to define the disease, Byzantia cannot. Definitions, she says, are in any case no part of her business. It is enough to tear the old order down.
Byzantia, like her grandmother Wanda, is a destroyer, not a builder. But where Wanda struggled against the tide and gave up, exhausted, Byzantia has it behind her, full and strong.
Down among the women.
We are the last of the women.
About the Author
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1972 by Fay Weldon
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-1248-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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