Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

  Chloe faints. Hunger, or pregnancy? Soon she is being sick in the mornings. Pregnant, of course. Well. Oliver does not like rubbers, neither does Chloe. Besides, she has a kind of half-belief that she cannot get pregnant, that she’s not a grown woman but still a child, and has managed to impart this vision of herself to Oliver. A couple of months when she could have got pregnant and didn’t reinforce their mutual belief. The third month she is pregnant, and who more surprised than Chloe and Oliver?

  That kind of thing only happens to other people. They do nothing, while they try to assimilate the rather indigestible richness of this new experience.

  Chloe swells and burgeons and cannot hide her condition from the Lady Bursar when she comes inquiring after Chloe’s moral welfare. ‘We are in loco parentis, you know.’ Chloe next receives a polite letter from the Chancellor’s office asking her to leave the university, as it appears she is not benefiting from the course of instruction offered, and the waiting lists are long. There is no point in arguing, since by the next post comes a letter from her local Education Office saying that her grant has been stopped. Clearly, to be an unmarried mother is no easy matter, though in truth to be educated no longer seems important. She can look after Oliver if she does not have to go to lectures.

  Although Chloe and Oliver spend two weeks composing a tactful letter to Gwyneth, the latter is still upset when she receives their news. She gets flu and is in bed for a full week. In all the years at the Rose and Crown she has never before been ill. Mrs Leacock stops half her wages.

  forty

  PROCREATE AND MULTIPLY. HARDER than you might think for Marjorie, Grace and me. And to think how easily the cows and the bees and the stickleback and the toad and the spider seem to manage! In their various ways, of course; and no doubt the courtship habits of the widow spider are more bizarre than any behaviour pattern displayed by any of us. But of course they have no choice. They merely respond to the stimuli.

  Show a red brick to a female stickleback and whoosh, away go her eggs, spurting out to take their chance. She’s got no say. It simply happens. And no-one thinks to blame her. No-one says but you should have laid those eggs on a warmer day—poor little things!—and in a patch of the river so full of pike, and so fast-flowing, what were you thinking of! Better they had been never born at all, than subjected to such hardship, you must agree, you wicked, thoughtless mother? Just whoosh, away they went, and no comment.

  Whoosh, away Grace went, in such a calm, clear untroubled patch of water too. Private nurses, private hospital, her own gynaecologist, nanny waiting on the sidelines to catch the baby from the monthly nurse.

  A son, too, what Christie wanted. And all that money, and all those flowers, to soften the blow.

  First babies are all blows, make no mistake about it. Duck when you see one coming. The child-wife becomes a mother. The status-wife becomes a messy cowering helpless thing. Listen to her. Listen to the chorus. Help me, look after me, cosset me, she cries. Me and baby. What precious vulnerable things we are, and yes, I must have a blue ceiling for baby to stare at, you beast. Paint it when you get home from work and can’t you get home earlier? LOOK AFTER ME, you bastard! Of course we can’t go to the party, what about my milk supply. No, you can’t go by yourself.

  As for him, he’s impossible, more of a baby than the baby itself: pernickety about food, going mad from lack of sleep; he gets drunk, throws tantrums, falls ill, throws baby in the air for fun and fails to catch it when it falls. Oh loving husband, loving father, where are you? And we were going to be so happy, so complete, so different from everyone else! She, the monumental dangerous she, pads about the house, belly and breasts all swollen, desperate, distraught, wondering who this monster is she’s married. A baby to cope with, and a madman too!

  Tout casse, tout lasse.

  When Helen was having Marjorie, look what Dick went and did. And see the trouble that led to!

  Tout passe, tout casse.

  When Piers was two weeks old, Christie, then working on designs for a Fashion Pavilion for the 1951 Exhibition, made some serious structural errors, found out, and couldn’t be bothered calling the plans back for correction.

  Well, Christie hadn’t slept for a week, had he, and Grace’s lovely nipples were inflamed and cracked and when he touched them she screamed, so he fired the monthly nurse, who had clearly been criminally negligent, with five minutes’ notice and five months’ pay, and then, of course, another couldn’t be found for three whole days during which time Grace sobbed and called for her dead mother and her friends, clustering round the bed, glowered at him as if he were some kind of villain.

  Oh, nightmares!

  When Inigo was three weeks old Oliver went off on a fishing trip. He couldn’t work with a baby in the house, and he had a script to finish. Near the water, he was always more productive.

  Two weeks after Petra was born Christie swept Grace off on a holiday to the Bahamas, leaving the baby behind. He needed a rest from babies, he said. While he was away the roof of the half-finished pavilion fell in killing three people—two of them only plebs, builders—but the other one his Chief Assistant. No-one left uncrushed so much as to murmur of criminal negligence; and actually Grace didn’t even get to hear about it, she was in a hospital in the Bahamas with a milk ulcer. The operation was clumsily done; she has a scar on her bosom to this day. Christie sued, but won only £2,500 damages and a lot of publicity. Breasts being news and deaths not.

  Oh babies! The blows fall hard upon the neonate, a little softer on the multipara; being anticipated, merely hurt the more. A duller pain, perhaps, not quite so piercing.

  When Esther was in hospital giving birth to Stephen, Edwin was lifting his potatoes and putting in daffodil bulbs, to please her in the spring. She never saw them, and nor did he, or knew that he had conceded her the victory.

  As for Patrick—well! He painted mousy Midge at every stage of her pregnancy with Kevin, and wanted to paint her giving birth, except Midge’s father whisked his daughter away in an ambulance just in time—well, not in time, Kevin was born on the hospital steps, even more publicly than if she’d stayed at home—and Patrick was so angry he said let her father visit her, why should I? I’m superstitious about hospitals. And he didn’t visit at all. And when Midge was giving birth in St George’s, to Kestrel, Patrick was with Grace in the very next labour room, holding her hand as she gave birth to Stanhope. Just as well somebody was there—it was Christmas Eve and the nurses were singing carols in the wards, and the interns had been drinking.

  Never conceive in March, Grace would say, afterwards, not if you carry to maturity. Never have a baby at Christmas.

  forty-one

  CHLOE’S BABY MISCARRIES AT five months. Chloe cries and so does Oliver. Something is lost, they both feel it. They have been attacked by outside forces, and something has been taken from them. Yet what pleasure it is to weep together, to be each so identified with the other that loss for one is loss for both, and comfort likewise?

  Chloe and Oliver are married in Bristol Register Office in superstitious haste, before worse befalls. It is too late, of course, for the baby, and for Chloe’s degree, but not for each other. It also means that Oliver can get a married student’s grant, double what he is getting already, and that he and Chloe can live in moderate comfort, while he studies, and she cooks and warms his bed, and, both agree, has the best of the bargain.

  Good days. Unmarried students flock to their attic door, to see what marriage is like.

  Chloe does not write to tell Gwyneth that she is getting married, only that she has lost the baby. Why not? Perhaps she feels Gwyneth has so little happiness of her own she might be tempted to steal her daughter’s by disapproving of the match, or crying, or worse, smiling her small brave smile throughout the ceremony, and raising her eyebrows at the frivolity of this secular occasion; or perhaps it was that Chloe, somehow, hoped to save her mother from the pain of the memory of her own marriage, and widowhood, and the realization that now her lif
e was over, and Chloe’s begun.

  Either way, whether prompted by nervousness or kindness, Chloe, most unkindly, does not write.

  Oliver, likewise, keeps the marriage secret from his family. Why? Well, his sisters were married at about the time of Chloe’s miscarriage, in a spectacular double ceremony of joy and lamentation mixed, which costs Oliver’s father all his savings in food, ritual, flowers and orchestra, and which Oliver fails to attend, by virtue of tearing an achilles tendon as he boards the train on his way to the wedding. The pain is acute, his paralysis total—how he writhes and groans on the platform; Chloe, seeing him off (not asked herself, of course) is faint with shock and pity—his sisters (he presumes, for they never write) offended, and his father (he assumes) hurt to the quick by the nebbish nature of his atheistical if academic son. Does Oliver wish to compound the hurt (as people will when they discover they have hurt, and never meant to) by keeping his own marriage secret—or was the marriage itself the intended hurt? For in Rudore family mythology, shiksas are for laying, not for marrying, and who more shiksa than Chloe, that Christian girl of now scandalous repute?

  If you had asked Oliver at the time, he would have looked blank and said ‘It is nothing to do with my family whom I marry. or how, or when, or why.’

  And he would have said whom, not who, because that was in his nature too.

  When Oliver has his degree—and to his dismay he gets a Third Class Honours degree and not the First he has predicted for himself—he and Chloe move to London. They live in a bed-sitting room in Battersea, beneath the towers of the Power Station, which sends out a cloud of black smoke to cloak the air above them. For this was in the days before London became the clean and almost sparkling place it is now, and fogs and smogs harassed the life and lung of its inhabitants.

  Chloe, without any academic qualifications to speak of after fifteen years continuous study, feels herself lucky to get a job as a counter assistant in the British Home Stores selling twin-sets—those short-sleeved round-necked jumpers each partnered by a long-sleeved cardigan in the same (and usually pastel) shade. Sometimes she is moved to the jewellery section, where the strings of mock pearls, which complete the effect of the twin-sets, are sold. She enjoys her work—folding, smoothing, measuring, handling—her every movement neat, precise, feminine and controlled. Her capacity for dedication is immense. She is very soon offered promotion to assistant manager, but declines. To accept would mean an extra half-hour’s work a day, and arriving home later than Oliver. She feels she ought to be back before her husband, to have the room warmed and the tea ready. The fogs and smogs make him cough.

  It is to Chloe such an astonishing and unlikely pleasure thus to have the legal and permanent enjoyment of a man that she becomes almost religious, for fear of God’s revenge. She will call in at the Catholic Church on her way home to light candles and placate Him.

  And still she does not tell Gwyneth she is married. She writes, but does not visit.

  Oliver works variously as a supply teacher, as assistant floor manager for BBC radio and as Welsh Rarebit maker at Lyons and so on, but his views are (according to his employers) arrogant and impossible, and he is fired from positions whence no-one has been fired before—a matter for some pride to both Chloe and him.

  What an original person Oliver is—so brave, honest and full of integrity. Ah, she loves him! Oliver hates the rich, the powerful, the smug, the beautiful, and the successful. Oliver equates virtue with failure, and integrity with poverty. Oliver sleeps badly; he wakes shrieking from nightmares; he suffers atrociously from migraines, indigestion, bronchitis, hangovers and depression. Well, she knew all that.

  Chloe shares Oliver’s distresses gladly. She lives through his depressions, soothes his migraines, appreciates his writings, nurses his indigestion, endures his rages—knowing them to be with himself and not with her, however loud he shouts and however many plates he throws, and however many tears she, in the end, is forced to shed. And knowing that, come nightfall, and the wearing thin of his anger, he will look surprised, and clasp her to him, loving her as much as he loves himself—and what more than this can any woman ask of any man? These too, it seems, are happy times. And the light from this happiness casts a glow both before and after in both their lives.

  This was the fore-vision, no doubt, which comforted the child Chloe as she lay fearful in her hard bed: and gave the young Oliver the will to plant and replant his garden, though the soot fell, and the dogs and the cats shat, and his sisters planted their great erasing feet amongst his tender seedlings. And this is the happiness which neither Oliver nor Chloe can now forget, as they circle each other, in and out of the events of their lives; the children, her friends, Patrick Bates; for how many more confusions, it turns out, have already been planted in her young life than in his, on that first night they met, which were later to flower, and proliferate and grow rank.

  One day, of course, they are obliged to go to visit Gwyneth. She looks up from the tankards behind the bar of the Rose and Crown at the two young people facing her, and for a moment, almost wilfully, does not recognize her daughter.

  Chloe Mother.

  Gwyneth (Presently) Oh, it’s you, Chloe.

  Chloe Mother, I have something to tell you.

  Gwyneth You’re married, I know. Marjorie came down to see me and told me.

  Female friends. Ah, female friends.

  Chloe (Indignant) Then why didn’t you write to me—

  Gwyneth just stares at her.

  Chloe (Panicky) Mother, don’t be like this.

  Gwyneth looks older, and tireder, and sadder. Chloe looks as lovely as she ever will. The abortive pregnancy has left her trembling on an uncertain brink somewhere between the girl and the woman: she has the best of both worlds. Gwyneth goes off to clear the tables.

  Oliver It’s my fault, Mrs Evans.

  Gwyneth (When she returns) You look just like her father, you know that, don’t you. I hope your lungs are good, that’s all. Keep the sheets well aired, Chloe.

  It is forgiveness, acceptance, and reconciliation. She and Chloe, who lived so close and who so seldom touch each other, actually embrace, and cry a few tears. Mrs Leacock allows her to give the young couple a free supper in the Nookery, and even to sit with them while they eat it. Well, Sunday evenings are slack.

  Chloe assumes that the next step is for Oliver to introduce her to his family. She says as much to him as they lie awake one night in their Battersea room. Oliver is racked with coughs. The fog closes in upon the windows, seeping through cracks, and the unlined cotton curtains do nothing to keep it out. Oliver is earning fifteen pounds a week, which is wealth beyond dreaming, but will spend not a penny more than he can help. He works for the Rank Film Organization, where he started at eight pounds a week, and in spite of his noisy hatred of the commercial film industry, and his public castigation of it daily in the canteen as the whore of Cinema, and his drunken afternoons, he is not fired. Rather, his employers, seeing this behaviour as the sign of talent, insist on promoting him. He is given one film to write, then another. He has a gift for it. B-features, seedy thrillers; Oliver is totally involved as he writes them, giving them an internal validity no-one else quite manages—and totally horrified at himself when he has finished.

  Chloe Don’t you think we should go and see your family?

  Oliver I haven’t got a family. I only have a father. My sisters have passed into their husband’s care, thank God, and I hope they’re equal to it. The uncles and aunts are on their way to Bishops Avenue via Golders Green and Stamford Hill. (This being the route British Jewry takes from East End poverty to North London prosperity.) I have less of a family than you do, Chloe.

  Chloe It’s not a competition, Oliver.

  This is not the sort of thing she should say, or usually does. But having offered Oliver his in-laws, she feels the least he can do is offer her the same. Or is he ashamed of her? Married life, to Chloe, is beginning to seem more complicated than she had at first supposed.
Unless, of course, she can continue for ever to subjugate her own interests in the way she so far has. Oliver turns his back on her and tries to go to sleep. She will not let him.

  Chloe And Oliver, please darling, it’s ridiculous living the way we do now you’re earning so much money. All my wages go on the rent, which is two pounds two shillings, and food, which is three pounds however hard I try, and your fares, which are six shillings every week, and that leaves me with three shillings a week for everything else.

  Oliver It was your idea to save.

  Chloe Yes, but not all your salary.

  Oliver Are you saying I’m mean?

  Chloe Of course I’m not, darling. We’re not quarrelling, are we? We never quarrel. It’s just I darn and I darn but my knickers are in rags, and your socks must be dreadfully uncomfortable and the sheets have been sides to middle twice—can’t you feel it—and the egg slicer has worn so thin it bends when you pick up an egg and it falls off. I lost two last week that way and it’s such a waste. We bought it at a jumble sale anyway. If I could just have three shillings I could get lining material for the curtains and then you’d sleep better. If it’s not the fog coming through, it’s the lamplight from the street. You never used to be like this, Oliver.

  Oliver For God’s sake, Chloe, stop nagging. I’ve got to get up at eight tomorrow in order to get half way across London so I can prostitute my soul from nine-thirty to five-thirty in order to keep you. If I wasn’t married I wouldn’t dream of doing it, I can tell you.

  Chloe is tearful, and silenced, for a while.

  Chloe (Presently) And you’re always so tired when you come home, and if you stop work at five-thirty why are you never back ’til eight, and you’re bad-tempered and I’m fed up and miserable and I wish I’d never married you.

  Oliver It’s mutual.

  Chloe is horrified. She weeps such pitiful tears that Oliver is alarmed and comforts her, and they don’t get to sleep until four in the morning, and the next day Oliver has a temperature and has to stay at home.