Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

  Marjorie Of course, mother.

  Helen Rations are very meagre, I know, but we all have to make sacrifices. Besides, you’re slightly built, so you should find them perfectly adequate. I hope you’ve brought your clothing book with you? Good! How many? Sixty-seven points? Lovely! I’ve seen such a nice winter coat in Harrod’s sale, and being the cold person I am, it simply isn’t safe for me to drive my generals about if I’m not nice and snug and warm. It’s all right for you, safe and snug in front of the fire.

  Marjorie I can’t get any coal.

  Helen For heaven’s sake then, child, use your initiative. There’s enough old wood in that garden to fuel a battleship for a month. And Marjorie, you won’t leave crumbs in the kitchen, will you. I don’t want the mice encouraged. How are your lessons going?

  Marjorie Very well. I got an Alpha for a Latin prose.

  Helen They have to give you something in return for all that money. I’m positive that all those tutors with degrees are either fakes or deserters, or worse. Or why aren’t they working in proper schools? Don’t look so dismal, dear, you have your father’s return to look forward to.

  Marjorie’s heart shrinks at the vision of some blind, mutilated stranger stumbling towards her, up the elegant, unswept stairs, calling her by the name of daughter.

  Helen Marjorie, what are we going to do about your hair? Your father will want to see you looking at your best. He has such an eye for a pretty woman, we all know that. Besides, it is a woman’s duty to look her best, especially in time of war. It gives the men something to fight for. Perhaps if you tried brushing your hair a hundred strokes each side.

  Marjorie I did try. It went all greasy.

  Helen Better that than like a haystack.

  Marjorie goes home. Helen gives her an extra ten shillings for which she is grateful. She spends it on stationery for her correspondence course.

  Marjorie hopes a V1 bomb will fall on her soon. She begins to think the house is haunted. It takes all her courage to go through from the living room to the kitchen. It’s as if some kind of invisible curtain hangs between them; she has to use all her strength to brush it aside. And in the kitchen a force rears up in front of her, saying go back, go away. She tends to do just that.

  Marjorie eats her food, uncooked, in the dining room and gets her water from the bathroom.

  Marjorie finds it more and more difficult to leave the house. She has nowhere to go, in any case. People in the street seem strange and distant, as if they inhabited another universe. Her voice, as she shops on Monday mornings, sounds hollow and undersea, a booming in her ears. And what she says sounds so nonsensical that she is surprised when the shopkeeper understands, and hands her food in exchange for money and coupons.

  Marjorie is seventeen. She is in a nightmare. Some life comes to her off the pages of text books. And she manages a quite bright response to a Miss Janet Fairfax, MA, who corrects her Latin proses and from time to time adds an encouraging comment—well done! What a flair you have! How well you handle the living language, as well as the dead!

  Marjorie thinks, she is probably a phoney. A fake or a lady deserter from the ATS. Or some maiden lady running a tea-shop and knowing nothing. But she is pleased, all the same. It makes a slight wall of warmth to help keep the cold out.

  Marjorie goes home from the shops. She works, eats, clears the house up, barricades herself into her room after dusk. But whatever it is in the kitchen seems now to extend to the dining room. It is growing. She eats in the bedroom. The side of the house where the bathroom is seems less afflicted. The sun shines in through the portholes onto the staircase and makes yellow pools of light on the shallow stone steps.

  Buzz-buzz. There it goes! Hitler’s swan-song. Please fall. Spare someone else. Choose me.

  No.

  There is a private boys’ school down the road. The boys were evacuated throughout the war but have lately moved back to London. Young men walk up and down past her windows: it is beyond the bounds of possibility to talk to them.

  Marjorie wakes in the middle of the night. Something’s in the room. The heart thudding, the hand creeping out to switch on the bedside light. Quick. No. Nothing. Just the knowledge that it’s there, in the room; come out from the kitchen. Why? Marjorie flees from the room, through the unseen curtain, which parts unwillingly to let her through. She sits all night on the stairs, with the light on and the full moon shining through the windows.

  Marjorie begins to bleed. She doesn’t dare move up to the bathroom to wash or back to the bedroom for paper sanitary towels. The stairs are stained for ever.

  The next day her father returns. Dick. He wears a patch over one eye, and the other is opaque, but still has some sight in it. All the same, he walks with one hand rigid in front of him as if he were pushing away obstacles. He is gaunt; his head is prickly with newly-grown hair. Marjorie does not remember him: Dick clearly has other things to think about than her. A Red Cross lady comes with him. She is kind, and settles him in his bed, tells Marjorie not to worry, just to wait.

  Where is Helen? Why, Helen’s in the Shetlands, taking an American general on a visit to Northern defences. He’d always wanted to see Shetland sheep, in any case, having had a very expensive Shetland pullover in infancy. When else in his life will he have the chance? Helen drives him all the way, as obliging out of bed as in it. Marjorie sends a telegram at once—but the Shetlands are a long way, and the posts are not reliable, and it does not arrive.

  That was Monday.

  Marjorie comes to life and goes into the kitchen without thinking. She makes tea, and gives up all her butter ration so that Dick can have buttered toast. Dick lies on his back on the bed and sleeps, and rouses himself to eat, and then falls back again. Sometimes he just lies with his eyes open, blinking a little, thinking. What about?

  That was Tuesday.

  Buzz-buzz

  Please don’t fall.

  No.

  That was Wednesday.

  Dick sits up, smiles, takes Marjorie’s hand.

  ‘Well, Marge,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we should call you butter.’ He goes to sleep again. What a rare and precious commodity butter is.

  That was Thursday.

  It is night time. Dick gets up out of bed while Marjorie is asleep, goes up the blood-stained stairs (does he notice?) to the attic, to look at his books. He sees mildew and smells dry-rot. He comes down to the kitchen and has a heart attack and dies.

  That was Friday.

  Marjorie finds Dick on the kitchen floor. Helen comes back. The Red Cross say the death was to be expected, had they not made that clear? Helen says it is all Marjorie’s fault for not calling her back. Well, she is very upset.

  That was Saturday and Sunday.

  Marjorie goes to Bishops Stortford to sit her Latin exam. How callous and cruel you are, says Helen.

  That was Monday.

  What a week!

  Buzz-buzz

  Shoo fly, don’t bother me!

  Marjorie gets Honours in all three subjects.

  thirty-six

  MARJORIE, GRACE AND ME. How do we recover from the spasms of terror and resentment which assail us, in our marriages and in our lives? When we lie awake in bed and know that the worst is at hand, if we do not act (and we cannot act)—the death of our children, or their removal by the State, or physical crippling, or the loss of our homes, or the ultimate loneliness of abandonment. When we cry and sob and slam doors and know we have been cheated, and are betrayed, are exploited and misunderstood, and that our lives are ruined, and we are helpless. When we walk alone in the night planning murder, suicide, adultery, revenge—and go home to bed and rise red-eyed in the morning, to continue as before.

  And either the worst happens, or it doesn’t. Or one is mistreated, or one is not, the answer is never made clear. Life continues.

  Marjorie recovers her spirits by getting ill. She frightens herself with palpitations, slipped discs, stomach cramp. Snaps out of anxiety and depression and into hypoc
hondria. She sits another examination, though with hands trembling and aching head. She writes another memo. Gets another job. Life continues.

  Grace takes direct action. She throws out the offending lover, has hysterics, attempts to strangle, breaks up her home, makes obscene phone calls, issues another writ, calms down. Goes to the hairdresser and demands that the manicurist does her toe nails. Life continues.

  I, Chloe, move in another tradition, like my mother and Esther Songford before me. Mine is the mainstream, I suspect, of female action and reaction—in which neglected wives apply for jobs as home helps, divorcees go out cleaning, rejected mothers start playgroups, unhappy daughters leave home and take jobs abroad as au pairs.

  Rub and scrub distress away, hands in soap-suds, scooping out the sink waste, wiping infants’ noses, the neck bowed beneath the yoke of unnecessary domestic drudgery, pain in the back already starting, unwilling joints seizing up with arthritis. Life continues.

  thirty-seven

  GRACE IS THE FIRST to marry, prancing back to Ulden with a ring on her finger, a white wedding behind her, and Christie at her side.

  Who’d have thought it a year earlier, when Grace sets off for London and the Slade from Ulden station, with only Gwyneth, Chloe and the Vicar to see her off. Her mother decomposing in the churchyard, her father nutty in a nursing home, and The Poplars up for sale. Nervous, affectionate and chattery, looking thin for once, and not just slim.

  ‘A pity Marjorie isn’t here,’ Grace says, as they wait for the Toy Town train. It is early October, and a damp and dismal day. Chloe is constantly surprised, these days, at Grace’s softness. Grace even tucks her gloved hand under Gwyneth’s arm and she is normally cool and distant with her friend’s mother, who when all is said and done, in spite of her lilting voice and ladylike ways, is only a barmaid.

  But after her mother’s death, for a time, Grace becomes humbler and gentler, and grateful for affection.

  ‘Remember the day Marjorie and you arrived,’ says Grace. ‘There were so many people around then. Now there seems to be no-one. Everything’s running down.’

  ‘It was a very smelly train,’ says Gwyneth. ‘And they were very upsetting, dangerous days. Times are better now.’

  But they are nostalgic, all the same, for those days of innocence and growth and noise. The post-war world is drab and grey and middle-aged. No excitement, only shortages and work. The airfields are closed, the Americans gone, the troops have been demobilized. Even Patrick has left, taking his guilty excitements with him, leaving virtue and propriety behind. Cabbages grow wild in Esther’s flower-beds, but the roses have taken over Edwin’s bean trellises. Neither of them won, neither Edwin nor Esther. They were evenly matched in the end.

  ‘You will look after yourself, Grace dear,’ says Gwyneth. ‘You’re too young to be setting off on your own.’

  The Vicar has found Grace a bed-sitting room in Fulham, her place is waiting at the Slade, she has two hundred pounds in the bank, she can’t wait to be off, but Gwyneth worries.

  ‘No younger than Chloe,’ says Grace. Chloe is off to Bristol University the following week. Gwyneth is trying to get used to the idea. For seventeen years the circumstances of her life have been dictated by Chloe’s needs. Now she will be free, when she no longer has the strength to use her freedom.

  ‘Still too young,’ says Gwyneth.

  ‘I can look after myself,’ says Grace. ‘Marjorie’s in London. I won’t be alone.’

  ‘Now remember,’ says Gwyneth, ‘don’t let yourself be alone with a man, then you can’t get into trouble. It’s a simple rule. I hope Chloe remembers it.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a branch of the SCM at the Slade,’ says the Vicar.

  ‘The SCM?’ asks Grace.

  ‘Student Christian Movement. And at Bristol too, Chloe. They’ll help you meet other young people socially under proper supervision. We’re not wet-blankets, we old codgers of the cloth: We know girls want to meet boys and boys want to meet girls.’

  Grace thinks of the muddy ditch in which she lay with Patrick. Chloe of her mother’s bed, and the unlocked door, and Patrick.

  ‘Yes,’ says Grace, politely.

  ‘Yes,’ says Chloe, the same.

  ‘I wish you’d put it off a year,’ says Gwyneth.

  When one mother goes, another moves in.

  ‘Too late now,’ says Grace.

  Grace has burnt her boats. Her mother is dead, the baby sent off, her father is having a nervous breakdown. It is all Grace’s fault and she can’t wait to get out of Ulden.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ says Chloe. ‘You just don’t get on the train.’

  Chloe worries lest Grace meet Patrick in London. Perhaps even at the Slade. For did not Patrick, usually so secretive, once let fall that after the war he meant to use his ex-service educational grant at art school? Does Grace know more than she does? Chloe can’t ask. Chloe and Grace never talk about Patrick, for fear of what they might hear, and this major silence sets up a whole chain of little silences between them.

  Still, if you’re going to be laid and left, it might as well happen in silence. The humiliation, otherwise, is extreme. Both feel it.

  Chloe is wrong, as it happens. Patrick goes to the Camberwell School of Art, not the Slade, and sees more of Marjorie than anyone else. Marjorie has a large house all to herself, after all, and Patrick sees no point in paying rent. He finds her address in his pocket-book. Chloe had given it to him.

  Patrick What a superb house. What decadence!

  Marjorie I’d clear it up if I knew where to start.

  Patrick It would be a shame to do that. I like it as it is. Are you here all by yourself?

  Marjorie Yes. Mother’s in South Africa.

  Patrick Don’t you get rather lonely?

  Marjorie Yes.

  Patrick The locks don’t look too good.

  Marjorie They’re not. Sometimes when I wake in the morning the front door’s ajar. And of course I can’t use the kitchen at all because it’s haunted.

  Patrick What by?

  Marjorie I’d think my father, except he died in there months after the haunting began. Unless of course these things have a different time scale from ours.

  Patrick A ghost is the projection of a living person, not a dead one. If you stopped being so unhappy and depressed the ghost would go away.

  Marjorie What makes you think I’m unhappy and depressed?

  Patrick The spots on your chin.

  Marjorie is fascinated rather than insulted. That the state of the mind and the state of the body might be inter-related is something that comes to her with the shock of truth.

  Marjorie How do I stop being unhappy and depressed?

  Patrick You get me to move in as the lodger.

  Patrick smiles at her. How broad, strong, young and healthy he appears, and how simple, sensible, and straightforward his requests. You would think he was a farmer’s son and not a criminal’s.

  Marjorie Mother doesn’t like strangers in the house.

  Patrick Your mother’s in South Africa.

  True, thinks Marjorie, with a flicker of, what, spite?

  Patrick And I am not a stranger.

  True. Patrick kissed Marjorie once, in 1946, leaning his strong hands against her small ones, pinning her against the trunk of a poplar tree, and who’s to say what might not have happened if it had not started to rain, or indeed if it had been a different tree, and not a poplar, with its upstretched, unsheltering branches. How Marjorie had trembled. Patrick Bates, grown man, in His Majesty’s uniform, and she nothing but Helen’s plain and awkward daughter. ‘Never mind,’ he’d said then, as if he knew more about her than she did herself, and what can be more erotic than that. ‘Never mind.’

  Now Marjorie steps aside, and Patrick steps in. He looks at the ceiling of the long living room, and the criss-cross of curtain rails, from which hang moth-ridden brown curtains.

  Patrick What’s that patch of damp?

  Marjorie Ther
e’s something wrong with the roof, I think. It gets worse when its been raining. I don’t understand it. The roof’s two floors up. How could the rain get down this far?

  Patrick I’ll see to it.

  But he never does.

  Patrick moves in with his paints and canvases and suitcases, and makes his home the living room. He goes to Camberwell by day, and paints in the evenings, still lifes at first, and presently Marjorie, at first clothed, and then unclothed. He makes no further demands on her. He does not wish her to cook, or wash, or clean for him. He prefers to eat baked beans cold from the tin, and once the possibility of so doing occurs to her, so does Marjorie. Neither of them, these proud, strong days, likes to be beholden to anyone or anything.

  Marjorie’s chin gets less spotty.

  Helen moves to Australia. For two terms she fails to pay Marjorie’s tuition fees at Bedford College, where she is studying Classics. The Registrar sends for Marjorie, and refers to Helen, in a perfectly kindly way, as ‘one of these difficult parents’. Marjorie is most indignant on her mother’s behalf, preferring to blame the mail for her shortcomings. At Patrick’s suggestion she sells three Etty portraits for fifteen pounds each, to pay the bill. They were stacked in the wood shed in the garden, until he brought them in.

  One night Marjorie, untroubled for some time, wakes in sudden terror, spirit breath upon her cheek, and runs to Patrick for comfort. He sleeps, fully clothed, in a roll of blankets beside the long, once luxurious, sofa. But he will not allow Marjorie in beside him, though he does not himself understand why not.

  He sends her back to the troubled, heaving darkness of her room, which no amount of electric light seems able that night, to brighten.

  ‘If you are the bride of darkness,’ he tells her as they breakfast off cold tinned macaroni cheese, ‘and I suspect you are, then who am I to come between you and your succubi? It is too dangerous.’

  ‘But I get so frightened,’ she says. ‘And what are you talking about? I know it’s only projection and neurosis and so on.’ She does not love Patrick. She feels too close to him for that. He is father and brother in one.