Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

  Marjorie gives post-production parties at her flat and would sleep with anyone who cared to remain behind, except her insides will not allow, or very seldom. She bleeds too much.

  I, Chloe, believe you shouldn’t get your feet wet when you have a period, that pre-menstrual tension is the result of fluid retention in the brain, that sex is for the begetting of children. That some children are meant—and that the most unlikely people will come together to produce a child, and having done so will part again, astonished at what they’ve done: that some of the most robust and kindly couples can’t help producing thin, weedy and miserable children and there’s no fairness in any of it. That children do not change their essential natures between the day they’re born and the day they leave home, and that there’s precious little you can do to help or hinder on the way.

  I, Chloe, believe that if you do not consider your reproductive organs they will function properly, and that the harsh light of inquiry is damaging to their well-being.

  Feel your breasts today and have cancer tomorrow. A cervical smear now means the womb out soon. Experience shows it to be true, if not statistics.

  I, Chloe, feel my function to be maternal and not erotic. I cannot concede that it’s possible to be both, though reason tells me it is: and that is why I do not mind Françoise sharing Oliver’s bed. It allows me my dignity.

  Besides, a mother must be watchful. It is one of the laws of nature that one cannot be watchful and orgasmic at the same time.

  thirty-three

  GREENFLY COVER THE HONEYSUCKLE like a surging foam. Chloe notices it on her return from London. The flies reproduce themselves like broomsticks in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. New small greenfly simply crawl out of the backside of older larger greenfly. Oliver told Chloe so, once, in wonder.

  After spraying the honeysuckle with the non-toxic spray that Oliver likes her to use, and watching a diminution of perhaps ten per cent in the level of the living foam, Chloe goes into the kitchen to face her family.

  Françoise is at the Aga cooker, preparing the boeuf-en-daube. There is no machinery in the kitchen apart from the refrigerator, which is essential to the chilling of Oliver’s champagne. Oliver dislikes the noise of domestic machinery: it jars his nerves. It is a symbol of the bourgeois content he dreads. He feels it to be more moral, with one half of the world starving and the other made wretched by the cult of conspicuous consumption, to have the dishes and clothes washed by hand; and the floors brushed on hands and knees; and closer to nature to have his food cooked over wood and coal, and not by electricity.

  There are open grates in every room. This is in defiance of the Clean Air Act, it is true, but it is clear to Oliver that industry pollutes the air and not the private domestic fire. And as for cars (Oliver has two, a Peugeot estate and a Mustang) they contribute only six per cent to total air pollution and the attack against the private car, as is well known, is diversionary tactics backed by big business interests.

  Chloe’s hands, for years, have been sodden with washing water, ingrained with dust and soot, splintered by the wooden floors. She is no longer interested in arguing with Oliver. He is better at arguing than she is. And why argue? Everything Oliver says about the outside world is patently true. She knows for herself that the Aga cooks better than would an electric stove: that hands break down less frequently than dishwashers or clothes washers; that deep-freezers spoil the flavour of food and denature it, that vacuum cleaners damage the valuable rugs; that it is immoral to employ other women to do one’s own dirty work; that central heating is enervating; that fitted carpets are a sign of growing old; that non-toxic greenfly spray does not kill butterflies.

  Now it is Françoise’s turn to live by Oliver’s principle. In her parents’ house at Rheims are many modern conveniences, even an electric carving knife—for the thin and economical slicing of excellent meat—and a mechanical vegetable chopper. Françoise has come to despise such gadgetry.

  When Chloe returns, Françoise’s face is wet with onion tears. Chloe is glad to see it. A whole layer of Gallic competence, she feels, is being peeled away. Beneath it lurks the universal woman, servile to the unreasonable will of the male.

  Oliver believes himself to be supremely reasonable.

  Oliver writes film scripts for major American film companies. His enemies (who are many) say they are slick. His friends (who are few) say they are competent. The scripts bring in a good deal of money. All Oliver wants to do is write novels. He would trade good money for good reviews any day.

  Oliver is a scholarship boy at Bristol University when Chloe first meets him. He has emerged phoenix-like from the rubble of the bombed East End to read English literature. Oliver’s parents are of Russian-Jewish descent. Oliver’s mother has recently died of cancer, and Oliver’s father is suing, out of public funds, a shop which sold his wife a fur coat the week before she died, and under which she died, and which the shop now declines to accept back in return for a cash refund.

  ‘They could tell she was dying,’ says Oliver’s father Danny, six times a night for six weeks. Oliver counted. ‘What sort of business sells a fur coat to a dying woman? You only had to look at her to tell she was dying.’

  Oliver hates his father, hates his sisters, hates the East End, hates the governments which have rained bombs upon his head, killed his friends, and destroyed by blast the garden he has so lovingly created in the back-yard, between the dog kennel and the clothes-line. He has renounced them all, along with chicken soup, Yom Kippur and shaven Jewish brides.

  One drunken night Oliver goes to a student’s party. Picture the scene.

  The student’s smoky room (in these days anyone who can afford to smoke does so, and very few have heard of lung cancer, let alone made a connection between that illness and cigarettes, though no doubt as many die from it); the travel posters (Cyprus, mostly) around the walls; the guttering candles (and the wax melts in untidy stalactic clumps, not blindly and neatly, as now); Chianti in straw bottles; rows of smiling jolly blackened teeth; men in their early twenties, National Service completed, or even—oh romance!—Active Service, wearing baggy grey trousers, white shirts, no ties—or, daring!—sweaters in muted colours, and cropped hair; the girls straight from school, in neat blouses, and pleated skirts, their hair feather-cut short, or permed into icy waves, their make-up thick and matte, concentrating—according to temperament—upon losing their virginity, or keeping it, or somehow, best of all, magically, doing both.

  Into this party, just after midnight, at the stage before conversation fades away and couples fall into horizontal innocent embraces, comes Oliver.

  Oliver does not look English. Oliver is too dark, too hairy, too discontented—and, shall one say, too Jewish. Not that anyone here is anti-semitic, on the contrary, just the feeling goes, that Oliver seems troublesome to himself and other people. He argues with professors, insults those who try to help him, finds fault with the syllabus and the examination system—but that’s what universities are for, surely—complains about the smallness of his grant, instead of being grateful for it like anyone else, and demands extra blankets and soft pillows for his bed—the comfort of which, after all, is underwritten by the long-suffering ratepayer.

  Whatever, of course, the rates may be. Only a few have any idea, knowing or caring little, as they do, how their society is organized. Oliver knows. His father wailed and his mother choked every six months when the buff envelope arrived from the Town Hall. Town Hall? What’s that?

  Oliver drinks the dregs of such Chianti bottles as he can find. He does not like these people. He has come to the party only because he cannot sleep. He feels himself to be superior to the other guests by virtue of his tormented past and his lack of insularity. Yet they insist, he knows it, on feeling superior to him, patronizing him, allowing him in their midst as a kind of mascot, as if their complacency was to their credit, as his torments a joke.

  And the girls! How he hates them, with their rounded vowels, their peeking bosoms, their daddi
es and mummies, their Aryan niceness. A proportion will even undermine him by obliging in bed, not wishing to be abused for purity or meanness—yet still, although on top of them he must plainly be victorious, they remain superior, kindly and patronizing. It is he who cries out in his spasm: the most they do is moan agreeably and tell him they love him, which he knows to be untrue. He can make them smart, he can make them cry; yet twist their soft spiritual arms as he may, he cannot make them angry, or nasty.

  They are too nice. They are not human. Human beings rant and roister, fuck and feed, love and smother, shake their fists at the universe in thunder storms and defy a creator who is sure to get them with the next lightning bolt. These little English girls, with their soft, uncomplaining voices, and their docile hearts, whose worst crime has been a foul on the hockey pitch, are quite alien to him. He feels at liberty to behave with them as he pleases, and if in so doing he gets the better of the blond, smiling men, with their cool, intelligent, experienced ex-service eyes, so much the better.

  Oliver’s feet kept him out of the forces.

  thirty-four

  DINNER, IT SEEMS, IS going to be late. If Françoise is still chopping onions then the boeuf-en-daube is far from ready. She wipes her eyes and turns them reproachfully towards Chloe. In the evenings, at the best of times, Françoise’s face tends to lose its daytime alertness, and to collapse into disorder, as if the spirit behind it had given up. Tonight she is grey with fatigue, and the corner of her eye is twitching.

  Good, thinks Chloe. Good, good. And then, what nastiness is this? See what Marjorie and Grace have done to me!

  Chloe Is anything the matter?

  Françoise No.

  Chloe Did you have a good day?

  Françoise Yes.

  Chloe Were the children helpful?

  Françoise Yes.

  Chloe You seem a little tired. Would you like me to take over?

  Françoise It is not necessary. It is all completed now.

  Chloe Isn’t it going to be rather late?

  Françoise It will be ready to eat at twelve fifteen.

  So Oliver, too, has had a bad day. It is not unusual for him, having abandoned one day as disagreeable, to postpone dinner until the next.

  Chloe Then what about the children?

  Françoise Oliver (How she pronounces the name, with what sensuous Gallic charm—Oli-vaire!) Oliver says the children are to have fish fingers. He says, in any case, it is a pity to waste good food on small fry.

  Chloe I’m afraid it will make you rather late, Françoise. I’ll stay up and clear away, if you like.

  Françoise No. That is not necessary. It is what I am paid to do, and the literary spirit is a flame which must be fanned and not quenched. I am honoured to be able to serve.

  There is a note of desperation in her voice.

  Chloe You must get some sleep.

  Françoise Oliver says that science tells us that the female needs less sleep than the male.

  Chloe I expect science does.

  Françoise May I confide in you, Mrs Rudore?

  Chloe Of course.

  What now?

  Françoise Mr Rudore wishes me to sit English O-level examinations, and the classes are so distant and the buses are so far and few between I am quite distrait.

  Chloe But your English is so good, Françoise. Really most colloquial.

  Françoise Mr Rudore wants it to be better still, so that when he reads me his writing I can criticize in an informed fashion.

  Chloe (Presently) Does he often read his work to you, Françoise? I had no idea!

  Nor has she. Chloe is hurt and upset. A pain catches her under her ribs. Perhaps Marjorie and Grace are right. Perhaps she is surrounded by enemies—perhaps bed is the thin edge of Françoise’s wedge.

  Françoise Today was the first occasion I have been so privileged. He called for you, but you were not there, Mrs Rudore. You were in London; visiting your friends. The creative flame is so easily dimmed, that when he asked me to take your place in the easy chair I could not, in all correctness, refuse. He also asked me for my honest opinion, but when I gave it, he said I must have English lessons.

  Chloe I hope you did not discourage him, Françoise.

  Françoise Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I am useless and ignorant. It has always been the same for me. I am misunderstood, and not appreciated.

  Chloe Françoise, we all appreciate you very much.

  Françoise And I am alone in this country without friends and I do not mean to do the wrong thing. I am trying to please everyone; it is a bad habit of my personality. Perhaps I should go home. I feel you do not like me.

  Chloe Françoise, of course I like you. You would not be here if I did not.

  Françoise puts her arms round Chloe’s neck, and lays her cheek on Chloe’s hair. Françoise is taller than Chloe. It is a gesture both childlike and perverse, and disturbing to Chloe. In some way this flesh, so close to Oliver’s, might be his. It is as if Oliver is touching her, and rousing her, through Françoise, yet still in the presence of a third person. Chloe stands still, neither accepting nor rejecting. When Françoise steps back, it seems the moment was after all innocent, of intent, or seduction, or even apology, and was indeed merely childlike. As a child will, she has recovered in the space of seconds from grief, guilt, and spite.

  Françoise Ah, so you forgive me. All is well again. We shall all be happy. It is a great pleasure to see friends, especially those of long standing, is it not? Oliver says you and your friends are, as the saying goes, thick as thieves. We agreed, he and I, you were right to go. It is important to cultivate friendship, after a certain age.

  Thick as thieves! What did they steal from each other, Marjorie, Grace and Chloe? Everything, in their desperate youth. Parents, lovers, children, a vision of themselves.

  Chloe denies her friends, to that Gallic snippet, Françoise.

  Chloe (Lying) They are not important to me.

  Françoise What a pity! It is different for me, of course. It is not natural for someone of my age to have many friends. Lovers, yes. Friends, no. In any case, female friends are not to be trusted.

  Françoise’s fiancé ran off with her best friend, on the eve of her wedding.

  thirty-five

  AT HELEN’S BEHEST, MARJORIE leaves The Poplars and moves into the house in Hampstead. The war is on its last ulcerated legs.

  Buzz-buzz.

  Is it a bee?

  Is it a wasp?

  No, it’s a bomb.

  A buzz-bomb, Hitler’s last secret desperate weapon.

  A Robot bomb, or doodle-bug, a Farting Fury or an unemotional V1.

  It was all right so long as you could hear them buzzing. When the engine cut out you knew they were about to fall, and probably on you.

  Marjorie, alone in Frognal, hears the same bombs as Oliver does in the East End. She welcomes the sound. Somebody, somewhere is thinking of her. Such is her frame of mind.

  As for Helen, she’s gone to Taunton, her current headquarters. She wears a gay red cap and bright red lipstick, drives a general about, and books in at his hotels. The Frognal house depresses her, as much as it does Marjorie. The long low curving rooms are flakey with rotten plaster. The metal curtain rails, which crisscross the ceilings like railway tracks at a junction, are rusty. They drop reddish flakes upon the pale unwaxed warping Bauhaus furniture. Creepers press and nod against the portholes. The roof still leaks: dry-rot has started, and the books and the bedding throughout the house are musty.

  Helen feels that the fabric and condition of the house is nothing to do with her. It’s man’s work. Even so, she complains of its gloom. If she is in London she books in at the Connaught Hotel, where cucumber sandwiches are still served for tea, and keeps away from Frognal. Marjorie is there, of course. Well, someone has to be, in case the house is burgled. (Helen lives in fear of thieves, and rape. Her gentlemen friends, even generals, are obliged to look under the bed before she can compose herself for sleep.) Besides, Dic
k is still expected back. A letter from the Red Cross says he is due for repatriation on humanitarian grounds. Prepare his bed, Marjorie.

  So Marjorie lives alone in the pale, dusty, damp house. She studies for her High School Certificate through a Correspondence College. Latin, Greek and French. Helen complains of the expense, but pays the fees. She allows her daughter ten shillings a week for food and keep.

  Marjorie goes to the shops on Mondays, buys her week’s rations, posts off the week’s work and goes home. Sometimes she does not leave the house until next Monday comes again. Once a month she goes to Ulden to spend a weekend with the Songfords. She cannot afford to go more often.

  Once, when Helen is passing through London, she meets her at the Connaught for lunch, and eats kedgeree with a listless appetite.

  Helen wears a cream shantung suit and a yellow hat. She does not seem to look older as the years pass, merely more immaculate. Marjorie wears one of her father’s old grey jerseys, found in a drawer, and a brown skirt borrowed from Grace. She has put on a maroon scarf in deference to the fact that she is lunching at the Connaught. And thus the conversation goes:

  Helen You’re much too thin, Marjorie. I hope you’re doing your bust exercises.

  Marjorie Yes, mother.

  Helen All that stooping over books! It’s bad for your figure.

  Marjorie It was never up to much in the first place.

  Helen One is as attractive as one believes, Marjorie. I do worry about you. You’re not lonely? All alone in that great house.

  Marjorie There’s no need to worry about me, mother. Please don’t. I’m perfectly all right.

  Helen Somebody has to be in the house, you see. I can’t put in a caretaker, not these days. A good paid servant is as rare as dust. They say they’re on war service, but my own opinion is they’re taking advantage of the national emergency. And if you find someone to do it, it would be like putting the key into the burglar’s hand! Now you’re getting enough to eat?