Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

  Love can only damage them, she sees it now. She must give them up, and him up, and so she does. Piers and Petra, goodbye.

  Piers, eventually, goes to Sandhurst, then Oxford, then the Guards. He always wears a tie, even on Sundays.

  Petra goes to finishing school and then takes a secretarial course. She is very good at flower arrangements and will one day have her photograph as the frontispiece of Country Life.

  After their father dies in a car crash (on the day after his third marriage to California), they go back to live with Geraldine, his second wife, who is very good to them, although she does not really like them. California was never interested in Christie’s children, in any case. She only cared about his money, and said as much, and Christie did not seem to mind.

  Grace, at Christie’s death, does not even inquire as to her children’s whereabouts. Everyone says how heartless Grace is, what a selfish, unmaternal, unnatural woman.

  Grace goes out to Golders Green, sometimes, where a plaque marks (supposedly) his ashes, and sits placidly in the sun beside it, as if waiting for him to rise up and re-form again, and start another wrangle, and re-animate her.

  Sometimes it is Patrick who drives her out there. He waits in the car, while Grace sits in the cemetery, and contemplates mortality.

  fifty-two

  MARJORIE, GRACE AND ME.

  Fine citizens we make, fine sisters!

  Our loyalties are to men, not to each other.

  We marry murderers and think well of them. Marry thieves, and visit them in prison. We comfort generals, sleep with torturers, and not content with such passivity, torment the wives of married men, quite knowingly.

  Well, morality is for the rich, and always was. We women, we beggars, we scrubbers and dusters, we do the best we can for us and ours. We are divided amongst ourselves. We have to be, for survival’s sake.

  fifty-three

  AFTER HER EVENING’S QUARREL with Oliver—if so lopsided a conflict could be termed quarrel—Chloe lies crying and dozing on her bed, the quilt pulled over her. Oliver approaches.

  Chloe is surprised. When she cries he normally keeps away from her. He does not like scenes. Afterwards, when she has regained her calm, he will renegotiate their marital relationship without reference to whatever incident has caused its temporary severance.

  Now Oliver sits at the end of the bed, and strokes Chloe’s hair. Chloe is exhausted by her grief. There is a luxuriant quality to her distress. He knows it, and capitalizes upon it.

  ‘It’s been a hard day, Chloe,’ he says, and then, astonishingly, ‘I’m sorry. But you shouldn’t take on so. What’s the matter?’

  ‘The things you said.’ To Chloe it is self-evident.

  ‘Words,’ says Oliver. ‘You know I don’t mean them. Why do you get so upset?’

  There is something strange about this, Chloe thinks, pleasant though it is. She sits up. Gently but firmly Oliver pushes her back against the pillows.

  ‘Stay there,’ he says. ‘I want to talk to you. I’ll lie down beside you.’ And so he does.

  Oliver talks up at the ceiling thus:

  Oliver You must have more confidence in my love for you, Chloe. We have been together for all our adult lives. We are part of each other. If I savage you with words, it is because you are an extension of me, and I say to you the things I feel like saying to myself. That’s all there is to it. But you will react to words as if they were blocks of stone, coming hurtling down upon your head.

  Chloe I’m sorry.

  Oliver It’s very damaging: it’s no use just saying that you’re sorry. You try and inflict a pattern of conventional married behaviour upon me which is alien to my nature. You want me to be nice. I’m not nice. People aren’t nice, not all the time, just some of the time. You drive me mad, Chloe.

  Chloe I’m sorry.

  Oliver Never mind. I love you.

  He takes her hand. He strokes it.

  Oliver I hate it when we are estranged.

  Chloe Then why estrange us, Oliver?

  Oliver lays down her hand.

  Chloe I’m sorry. I know it’s me. Ever since Patrick—

  He takes her hand again.

  Oliver Oh yes, Patrick. I think it is time you forgot Patrick, Chloe.

  Chloe How can I? You don’t.

  Oliver Dearest Chloe, you wrong me. See our marriage as a citadel, see Patrick ramming at the gates: he made a nasty dent in the walls, it’s true. But as for me, I don’t see the damage any more. He hurt himself more than us. He sent Imogen in, as a thief in the night, but Imogen has remained as our dearest ally. We have gained more than we ever lost, Chloe, you and me. And if the truth were told, I think Patrick has homosexual inclinations, and got at you to get at me. It was me he was interested in, not you at all.

  Chloe I expect so.

  Oliver Of course you, doing the actual betraying, feel worse about it than I ever did. It has coloured your behaviour for years. You have felt insecure and defensive—you’ve been no fun. You’ve stooped to jealousy. How ridiculous—what two—or three—people do to each other physically, what parts of each other they put into each other, can be a matter for pleasure, but hardly for pain. Patrick and I were friends—you couldn’t let that alone, you had to come wiggling your pretty little arse between us. I don’t think women understand the quality of friendship between men, and not understanding, resent it.

  Chloe I have friends. Female friends.

  Oliver Yes. You use them when you need them, discard them when you don’t. Male friendship is of a different order—it gives as well as takes.

  His hand has opened her blouse and is on her breast by now. Her nipples, in spite of herself, grow hard. She does not like to argue.

  Oliver Darling Chloe. Darling hard-and-soft Chloe. Remember what it all used to be like?

  Chloe Yes.

  And so she does. Her body certainly remembers, turning easily towards Oliver’s, with the same instinctive movements that a new baby makes towards its mother’s breasts.

  Oliver I’m sorry I made you cry. Put your arms round me.

  Chloe What about Françoise?

  Oliver Bother Françoise—

  Chloe But you can’t just—

  Oliver I can, you know.

  Chloe Poor Françoise, out in the cold—

  Oliver disengages himself from Chloe, gently.

  Oliver Very well. You are quite right. If you want Françoise you shall have her.

  What does he mean? She is confused. But Oliver seems more than rational.

  Oliver Take your clothes off, Chloe. Why have you gone to bed with your clothes on, in any case?

  Chloe I was too unhappy to take them off.

  Oliver My dearest Chloe, what would your mother say? You’re falling to pieces, you must be put together again, at once, this very night.

  Oliver helps Chloe undress.

  Oliver Your lovely body. I never forget it.

  Somewhere Chloe has heard these words before. Ah yes, the film his sisters thought so funny. Chloe went to a preview and told Oliver and everyone what a masterpiece it was. Only by clinging to that conviction could she escape the indignation she would otherwise feel.

  Oliver It doesn’t matter who I sleep with, Chloe, it’s always the same. They turn into you. All-wise, all-seeing Chloe. I sleep with Françoise and I dream it is you. I punish myself, instead of you. It’s a kind of superstition. I told myself that until I had finished the novel I wouldn’t touch you. I’d feed on my frustration instead. I’m sure that’s what went wrong with that last film—screwing you like fury all the time I was writing it. How could I stand enough away from myself to see my own life?

  He’s always denied it was his own life, but Chloe scarcely notices, so bemused, and so comforted, is she. As she says to Marjorie later, making light of it, ‘I thought I’d been rejected on sexual grounds, but no, they were purely literary, after all.’

  Chloe (Tentative) And will you be finished with the novel soon?

 
Or perhaps he has finished it? Perhaps that’s why he’s here, stroking her forehead, her breast, her tummy, between her thighs, with his familiar finger: her body is still warm and hopeful.

  Oliver It’s all madness, isn’t it. I’m mad, I daresay. I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll never finish it. I have writer’s block. I’ll burn it. Be done with it. Go back to writing commercial crap.

  Chloe You can’t burn it, not after all this time.

  Oliver Why not? What else can I do? You’ve taken to lying in bed with your clothes on, crying your heart out. I can’t have you unhappy. It upsets the children. I’ve got to throw Françoise out, I have no choice, and she’s so much connected with the novel, if she goes, it goes.

  Chloe But Oliver—

  Oliver Unless perhaps the three of us—

  Chloe stares at him unblinkingly, neither assenting nor rejecting, too astounded to do either.

  Oliver Lie there Chloe dear, don’t move. I shall save us all, you see.

  Chloe lies, dutifully. Oliver goes away and comes back with Françoise. She is bleary with sleep and wears an orange quilted nylon dressing-gown.

  Oliver We shall have no more evenings like tonight. No more days like yesterday. The two of you must be properly friends.

  Françoise We are most truly friends. Mrs Rudore is a most civilized and progressive person.

  Oliver Mrs Rudore! It is ridiculous. Her name is Chloe. Say it, Françoise.

  Françoise Chloe. But what of the respect due between servant and employer?

  Oliver Françoise, I am your employer, and I would like you to love as well as respect Chloe. Take off that dreadful dressing-gown. You have a beautiful body. Hasn’t she, Chloe?

  Chloe, alas, can almost see her husband framing the scene in preparation for his next film. As Grace was to say later, unkindly, ‘If he’s going to try skin-flicks, he’s wasting his time. Look what happened to Sebastian. Lost all his money and mine too. What the public wants these days is family entertainment, not scenes of lesbian delight. They’re old hat. There’s nothing left remarkable, not even pigs and fishes.’

  It is, perhaps, this sense of being projected on to some future screen, and of the unreality of herself (thus at last revealed) through Oliver’s eyes, which enables Chloe to lie at first without protest, and later with evident enjoyment, under Françoise’s pressing lips and investigating hands. Françoise, Oliver explains to Chloe, is bi-sexual, and takes as much pleasure in the female response as the male. After the 1968 fiasco, tired of making coffee, thereafter, for armchair revolutionaries, she had joined a commune of insistently lesbian ladies.

  Oliver And why not? The female is not treacherous, like the male. You women must learn to stick together. I’m sure you will. We men will be for decoration and to fill the sperm banks.

  Well, why not, indeed? If this is what Oliver wants. Chloe feels she has all but grown, at last, out of motherhood. She feels safe in the knowledge that Imogen sleeps soundly through the night. Chloe can be woman again, not mother, not watchful, and if Oliver says this is what women are like, he may be right.

  Françoise’s breasts are white and heavy, marked blue where Oliver’s fingers have pressed, the nipples are flat and pink. Her arms are dark with hair and are muscular, reminding Chloe of Oliver’s. Otherwise she is as soft and hard mixed as the Cherry Cup in a box of Black Magic chocolates.

  It has been a long and trying day, Chloe thinks. This is really no more remarkable than anything else, and better than crying alone on a bed. And has, besides, Oliver’s approval. Perhaps indeed, like this, they could all three be happy? Françoise whispers French indecencies in her ears. Dimly, Chloe understands them. Her body, paying attention, Françoise’s fingers probing, prepares itself to its surge of response.

  Ah, but no.

  Thus far, no farther, Oliver thinks (or as Helen once put it to Marjorie, spelling it out, with the jovial prudery of that earlier generation, thus far, no father!). Oliver intervenes between Chloe and Françoise separating them, bringing his orchestrations to a sudden, flat and silent halt. Françoise lies face down on the bed beside Chloe. Is she exhausted, overcome with emotion, or simply asleep? Chloe thinks it is the latter.

  Oliver sits on the edge of the bed by Chloe and strokes his wife’s forehead.

  Oliver So Chloe, now we see at last what your true nature is. I have always suspected it. You do not really care for me, or for any man. Your true response is to women. To your Grace, or your Marjorie, or your mother. The maid, even. Well, why not? There is nothing wrong with being a lesbian, except that the degree of your hypocrisy has been damaging to me. All these years pretending to be something you weren’t, blaming me for all our failures, throwing away our children. Of course your body rejected them. You have not been fair with me, Chloe.

  Chloe Oliver, really, I am not a lesbian. Don’t be ridiculous.

  He bends and kisses her, indulgently. She sits up, pushing him away. Oliver goes and sits beside Françoise, running his fingers down her spine.

  Chloe You are quite ridiculous. I don’t care what you say, any more, or what you do.

  And she doesn’t. Her sincerity seems both to impress Oliver and take him aback. He turns Françoise on to her back. She has been crying.

  Oliver You do care, Chloe. I’ll make you care. You’re not just going to sit there now and watch me and not care. You can’t.

  Chloe I can.

  Chloe’s head is quite clear. She is her own woman again. She can and she does. She watches Oliver go through the motions of intercourse with Françoise with as much dispassion as she watches her children bathe themselves. Françoise continues to cry, from exhaustion and now apparently fright, turning her head this way and that to avoid Oliver’s mouth, while Oliver takes what can only be termed his desperate and dubious pleasure in her.

  Françoise, disengaged, continues to cry.

  Françoise I am sorry to cry. I am so tired. Why is my life so wretched?

  Oliver Because you’re a silly stupid bourgeois bitch and not a liberated lady at all. Go back to bed, for God’s sake.

  Françoise goes. Oliver, Chloe sees to her amazement, has tears in his eyes.

  Oliver I’m sorry, Chloe. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I think I’m mad.

  Chloe So do I.

  Chloe finds she is laughing, not hysterically, or miserably, but really quite lightly and merrily; and worse, not with Oliver, but at him, and in this she is, at last, in tune with the rest of the universe.

  fifty-four

  WORKING-CLASS WOMEN, GRACE BELIEVES, have a rather better time of it than the middle classes—apart from starvation, disease, over-work, miscarriages, exhaustion and so on, of course. But in their personal lives, they have fewer expectations and for that reason, fewer disappointments. They put up with their husbands in bed, take their weekly money in return, pack them off to pubs and football matches, and get on with their own lives.

  Marjorie maintains that the great, gnawing, devitalizing vice of the middle classes is pretending to be nice when they aren’t. Patrick, she says, in the eyes of women of aspiring gentility and/or depleted nervous energy, smacks of the working classes, rumbling away with a raw, suppressed and vital energy, which must one day inevitably overwhelm and overcome, as the male overwhelms the female. Of course such women fall prostrate at his feet, welcoming the inevitable orgasmic defeat—and with it the expected punishment not just of their class presumptions, but for their female exploitativeness—which in turn is the product of their own exploitation.

  ‘Marjorie sees Marx in everything,’ Grace complains to Chloe, ‘and from the point of view of a female who always lies beneath the male. I’m dreadfully sorry for her. Why doesn’t she get on top?’

  Her own long-drawn-out affair with Patrick, in and out of the ruin of both their days, seems to bring her little happiness—as Marjorie frequently remarks.

  ‘Poor Grace,’ says Marjorie, ‘what a burnt-out case she is. Fancy putting your faith in sexual athletics. Grace
uses Patrick as a memory of better times, of course, when she still had some feeling left in her. As for Patrick, he doesn’t take her to Christie’s grave because he adores her—as she tells everyone—but to annoy Midge and because he likes the shape those dreadful headstones make against the sky.’

  While Grace plays fast and loose through the sixties, her thirties, invincibly fashionable—in and out of water beds and topless dresses and the occasional acid-trip, into the occult, and flying saucers, astrology and force fields, and finding therein, of course, cosmic justification for her quite irrational persecution of the unfortunate Geraldine: taking up prison reform after a night in the cells for disorderly behaviour in a Chelsea pub (coincidentally called the Rose and Crown), vying with Patrick, one might almost think, in the number and variety of her sexual exploits—though unlike Patrick never putting brush to canvas, as she would have been better employed in doing, if only to demonstrate to the world that she, like him, suffered from the disease of artistic talent and did not merely exhibit its more disagreeable and anti-social symptoms; aborting frequently instead (an outer and visible sign of an inner and spiritual state, Marjorie maintains, underlining her determination to destroy and not create)—while Grace thus plays fast and loose with herself and her fate, Marjorie plays safe.

  ‘Marjorie is very wise not to marry,’ says Grace. ‘She is the sort of woman born to be widowed five times. Her husbands would just drop dead one after another—you know how it happens—if not from poison then from sheer suggestion. Well, look at Marjorie’s record. First her father, then her Ben, then her baby. She’s best to stay where she is, putting the finger of death on television programmes.’

  And it is certainly true that Marjorie appears to avoid any personal commitment to anything other than a programme or a department. She battles with organizations rather than with people. She engages in a paper war of inter-office memos, fighting for position up the telephone list, to head first this section, then that, scaling the sides of the orthodox organizational pyramid the planners have made of the BBC; her name eventually there in leaded black, as near the apex as a woman can get.