Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

  Stanhope The menopause, I expect. She said I had the same father as Kev and Kes. Does that mean I can’t marry Kestrel?

  Chloe I suppose it does. Why, do you want to?

  Stanhope My God, no. Is that all? Can I go back to Match of the Day?

  Chloe Yes. Unless you want to know more about Patrick.

  Stanhope I’ll think about it all some other time, if you don’t mind. Could I change my name to Bob?

  Chloe Why not?

  Stanhope punches Chloe, exhilarated rather than depressed, and returns to the television. If such a thing had happened to me, thinks Chloe, such a revelation made between lunch and tea, I would have been finished for life. What saves these children? Television?

  That sleeping bitch, Grace. Prod her awake and see what she does.

  ‘You’ve missed your train,’ says Oliver, ‘if you’re going up to see Marjorie.’

  ‘No I haven’t if I run,’ says Chloe.

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ he says, and does. She finds his new servility embarrassing.

  ‘Give my love to Marjorie,’ he says. ‘I hope her mother’s all right. What did Grace want?’

  ‘Just to tell Stanhope who his father was.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘People should get married and stay married,’ says Oliver. ‘It’s less confusing for the children.’

  But Chloe is not to be drawn back into the complacency of former days, when Oliver and she, in spite of what Oliver called their ups and downs, were in the habit of congratulating themselves on the maturity of their ways, and their especial matrimonial superiorities.

  fifty-six

  STANHOPE IS OLIVER’S RESPONSIBILITY, as well as Chloe’s.

  It is Oliver, at Chloe’s request, who drives Grace to the nursing home and prevents her from having her abortion. Grace is four months pregnant with Stanhope—not a safe time for a termination but Grace has told lies about the date of conception and the abortionist has not seen through them. Well, he is a busy man. There is always a queue in his consulting room on Saturday afternoons.

  ‘I’ll probably die,’ says Grace, hopefully rather than anything else, to Chloe.

  ‘Tell him the truth,’ begs Chloe.

  ‘Certainly not,’ says Grace. ‘If he can’t tell by feeling then he’s an incompetent and if I do die the police will prosecute and he’ll go to prison, and it’s worth dying to have that happen. Unctuous bastard.’

  Abortion is still a criminal offence for both aborter and abortee. Grace’s termination is costing all of two hundred pounds and is being performed by a top gynaecologist, who does six abortions a day, five days a week, in a Harley Street nursing home. Monday mornings he kindly reserves for charity cases—twelve-year-old girls and alcoholics in their late forties. The company which owns the nursing home takes seventy-five pounds a patient. The rest is the surgeon’s due, except for twenty-five pounds per operation he gives to the anaesthetist—who, after all, risks imprisonment too.

  The surgeon plays golf on Sundays, and on Saturday mornings he writes articles and makes speeches in favour of the liberalization of the abortion laws. He is a busy man. On Saturday afternoons, he arranges his next week’s work. He believes (in a world which finds it hard to accept anything so simple) that women should have control over their own reproductive processes, and also in the law of supply and demand. How else justly regulate society? He is charming, kind, intelligent, immensely rich, and Grace hates him for the murderer and profiteer he is.

  This will be the fourth time he has stood at the end of her bed, told her not to be afraid, that she’ll wake up fit and well, and stretched out his scrupulously clean (well, one should hope so!) hand for the envelope containing the money. Cash, no cheques.

  The anaesthetist accompanies him on his round of the beds, sizing up the patients in advance, to save time, rather as the hangman used to do.

  Oliver provides the cash. Grace will be able to pay it back, but has difficulty in raising money at short notice. It is useless asking Patrick: his ashen pallor and the trembling of his hands when asked to provide cash is an offence against art, and indeed against human kindness. Oliver, rather than witness Patrick’s distress, forks out.

  On Tuesday evening Grace goes into the nursing home. She’s being done the next morning.

  On Tuesday night Chloe weeps and carries on.

  ‘Take the money away from her,’ Chloe beseeches Oliver. ‘You gave it to her. Go after her and get it back. It’s murder.’

  Chloe lies in bed after her latest miscarriage, pale and emotional. Only an eight-week foetus, not much—too soon for real grief, too late for indifference, though painful and messy enough—but with all her thwarted emotional energy now surging towards Grace’s baby, which must, she tells Oliver, must be saved.

  ‘Go and fetch her,’ she stamps and screams as Oliver stands appalled, gaping at her. ‘Fetch her! Tell her if she doesn’t want it, I do. She can’t do it! Oh, the bitch. The murderous bitch!’

  And Oliver, helpless and adrift in the sea of maternal passions, goes, though every instinct tells him not to. Arguments he can refute; hysteria he can cope with—but when Chloe invokes the elemental forces of motherhood, Oliver does what he is told.

  ‘What about Midge?’ he asks, at the door.

  ‘What about me, me?’ shrieks Chloe. ‘What about my baby?’

  Oliver closes the door behind him, between him and her, and goes to fetch Grace home.

  Grace gives birth to Stanhope at St George’s hospital, some five months later. Midge, neglected, produces Kestrel in the next room. The two babies are laid, as it happens, in adjacent cribs in the nursery, and baby Kestrel’s early eye infection—which was to linger for years—is laid, rightly, at Stanhope’s door.

  Meanwhile the traffic of London’s Hyde Park Corner surges round the foot of St George’s, as if everything in the world was prosaic, practical, and prone to forces well within our control.

  Midge, betrayed, totters through the commendable motions of struggling wifehood and motherhood for another two years, before finally giving up Patrick, Kestrel’s eye, love, duty and the ghost.

  Grace blames Stanhope for it all, of course.

  fifty-seven

  ST STEPHEN’S HOSPITAL IN the Fulham Road, where Helen has been taken, is overdue for demolition. Or so the taxi-driver tells Chloe, on her long journey across London from Liverpool Street Station, via St George’s hospital, to the Fulham Road, in the very thick of the rush-hour.

  ‘That place! It’s alive with black-beetles. I lost an uncle in there. Collapsed in the street and they whipped out a kidney. When he came round the nurse asked him how he felt. “All right,” he said. “Much better than when they took out the other one.”’

  Chloe is silent.

  ‘No offence,’ he says. ‘Just a joke to cheer you up. No-one close you’re visiting, I hope.’

  ‘No,’ says Chloe. ‘Not really close.’

  Marjorie’s mother Helen. It was Helen’s spite which drove Patrick into Midge’s arms, and so, though indirectly, drove Midge to destroy herself. Poor Midge, taken unconscious from her home, bound for St Stephen’s too, but never getting there dying in the ambulance instead.

  It was Stanhope and Kestrel’s birthday, though they were still of an age to prefer the wrappings of the birthday present rather than the present itself, having been in the world only two short years.

  Marjorie’s mother Helen. Trembling between youth and middle-age, back from Australia, loverless for an amazing moment, throwing Patrick out of Frognal. Motivated by what? A sense of property abused, or of flesh and blood defiled? For the big living room was stacked with portraits of Marjorie naked, and Marjorie naked, in Helen’s view, was altogether too lumpy, bumpy, frizzy and pear-shaped an affair to reflect credit on her mother. Or was it merely a trivial irritation to find Marjorie thus not personally care-taking, but off at Oxford taking a further degree, and financed by sources well out of Helen’
s control, having left the Frognal house in the care of a man who did not cut his hair or do up his shirt, or use a fork if fingers would do, and wiped his greasy fingers on the mat made by the hair on his chin stretching down to meet the hair on his chest, reddish, coarse and curly—was it this irritation which led Helen to throw Patrick out, destroy the paintings, and put a padlock on the front door?

  The door did not even close properly, and through the gap, narrow as it was, squeezed for several subsequent years a tide of cats, litter and leaves. Helen would have done better to have allowed Patrick to stay, and certainly not to have destroyed the paintings, which later would have been worth many thousands—although painted on too large a scale for the really perspicacious buyer. But of course Helen, and she was the first to admit it, was always prodigal with man-made works of art, seeing them as something presumptuous in the face of her own God-made female perfection, and a kind of challenge to it.

  She threw Marjorie out as well. Thus, summoning her from Oxford, meeting her in the refreshment bar at Paddington, over bad coffee:

  Helen Marjorie dearest, I am so distressed for you. How unhappy you must be to form an alliance with someone like that! And to think I was not here to protect you from it! To allow yourself to be painted, naked! To open yourself to such ridicule! What a tragedy it is that I could not bring you up myself, and develop your sensitivities. Esther Songford was a sweet soul, but so dull and so plain it would drive anyone to distraction, as you seem to have been. My dear child, I understand your desperation. We must face the fact that you’re no beauty; but it simply is not true that any man is better than no man at all. Better to live in celibacy, believe me, than with a member of the working classes. It is not snobbery, simply that their attitudes to women are different from ours—they make use of their women, treat them as animals, as I am afraid that Patrick Bates has made use of you. I don’t deny that to a certain sort of woman he might appear attractive, and he certainly made every effort to win my affections, Marjorie, I may say, in the hope of further free board and lodging, but he mistook his woman. I know what I have to offer a man. I don’t need the likes of Patrick Bates to tell me so. If you are to survive as a woman, Marjorie, and not to shrivel up into the blue-stocking you seem determined to become—what is all this Oxford nonsense?—you must develop a little more pride in your femininity. And that does not mean flaunting your nakedness in front of the working classes like some kind of prostitute. What are we to do with you?

  Marjorie But mother!

  Helen I have tried and tried to be a good mother to you, and you always let me down. Look at the state of the house—

  Marjorie I did my best—

  Helen But you did not. Any more than you did your best when your poor father died. I should have been there, and I was not.

  Marjorie I sent a telegram—

  Helen A telegram which did not arrive. Well, we will not go into that now, or your callousness, or your spite in trying to keep me away. It hurt me very much at the time, but my friend Peter Smilie—he runs the Department of Education in Sydney—has explained the resentments which apparently children—God knows why—hold against their parents. And I am sure your father’s death was sufficient punishment to you. I am just surprised you hold his memory so lightly, Marjorie. It would break his heart to think of you sunk to such depths.

  Marjorie But I’m not, mother. It’s not like that. We’re just friends. And poor Patrick, where’s he going to go?

  Helen You really think more of him than you do of me, Marjorie, I’m afraid. And don’t tell lies on top of everything else.

  She’s quite right. It is a lie. An empty bottle of Grand Marnier, kept beneath Marjorie’s bed, bears witness to it. Guilt depletes Marjorie’s strength.

  Marjorie It’s not a lie, and I’m sure Father wouldn’t mind Patrick staying at all. He loved paintings.

  Helen Good paintings, dear, not bad painters. You’re so naïve.

  Marjorie (Tearful) And I don’t want to be there by myself. It’s haunted.

  She had determined never to mention it, too. Rightly. See what happens when she does? Helen is affronted. Haunted? The happiest days in her life—before Marjorie put an end to them—were spent in that house. How can it possibly be haunted?

  Helen But you’re supposed to be so clever, Marjorie, how can you talk such nonsense? Haunted! If that’s what you feel about that poor house, we had better lock it up, close it altogether, and I’ll try and find a buyer. It’s too much responsibility if you won’t help me.

  Marjorie But where will I go in the vacation?

  Helen Stay in Oxford. Such a pretty place.

  Marjorie I can’t afford to. I only get a small grant—

  Helen Take a job. You’re not too grand for that, I hope, but please not as an artist’s model. You simply haven’t the figure, or the skin. There is to be a portrait of me in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Isn’t that exciting? And Marjorie if you don’t mind me saying so, you simply must not wear your hair like that. It’s so bad for the shape of your face. You always just thrust it back behind some old scrap of ribbon. I know it’s frizzy and discouraging but you have to work at these things, you know. Good heavens, you’ve drunk your coffee. How could you!

  Helen goes off first to the hairdresser, leaving her coffee untouched, and then to buy a padlock and order a carter to transport Marjorie’s things from Frognal to Oxford. Generously, she bears the cost herself. At the Summer Exhibition she meets a man from Newfoundland who owns a trawler fleet, and goes off with him to Northern climes. She looks better, these days, muffled up in sailor’s sweaters than sunning all but naked on the deck of someone’s yacht, and knows it.

  Helen does not marry again. She invested the total of her commitment, as women will, who have little to commit, into that first marriage, and the return on the investment proved, in the end, so disappointingly small, that she prefers not to repeat the experience. Like Grace after her, Helen never seems to be short of money. Dim male figures lurk in the background of her life, dispensing riches, kindnesses, holidays. What they get in return is not passion, but a kind of unkind condescension, a grudging parting of the legs, and such a total absence of orgasm as seems to fascinate rather than repel. And so fastidious is she, that to be allowed so much as to admire her is to these suitors a matter of self-congratulation.

  Oh messy, modern Marjorie. Living in college at term-time, working in a pub during vacations, sleeping in a room above the bar, looking out at closing time, as once Chloe did, upon those reeling scenes of male depression and debauchery: waiting, as if she knew, for Grace’s wedding and her own fate to come together on the same day.

  And Patrick, sent off by Helen into what she thought and hoped would be a wilderness, and which in fact was Midge.

  Midge the Mason’s daughter, dead.

  Whose fault?

  fifty-eight

  MARJORIE, GRACE AND ME! How do we grow old? How shall we die?

  Marjorie has her pension fund, her insurance policies, and perhaps, presently, the inheritance of her mother’s Frognal house. She does not let her mind go further than that—she keeps it trained on practicalities. Her epitaph will be the affection of her friends, the regret of her colleagues, and a shelf or two of tapes in the library of the BBC—until eventually, in the interests of economy, they too are wiped for re-use. She hopes for nothing else.

  Grace hopes to die suddenly, and soon, or so she says, before the shame of physical inadequacy overtakes her. She will not grow old serenely. She fights against it. Already she drinks too much. She is used to being admired, and only her looks are admirable. When they go, she goes, Grace says.

  I, Chloe, put my faith in children for my immortality. When I die, they will remember me, as I remember my own mother—and Esther, who, like me, saved other women’s children, stealing them in passing. Of such maternal warmth, I think, legal or illegal, is immortality made. It seeps down through the generations, fertilizing the ground, preparing it f
or more kindnesses.

  fifty-nine

  THE CORRIDORS OF ST Stephen’s hospital are long and green, lined with pipes, echo to the clanking of metal food containers and are foggy with steam, disinfectant and age.

  Helen is in a small ward, with four beds. Three are empty. Helen is in the fourth, propped up against pillows. She seems to be asleep, or in a coma. Her eyelids have fallen over her large eyes, as if by gravity and not from any muscular intent. Her old mouth droops. They have taken out her teeth. Her head is bald. Only the wound on her temple, too clearly seen beneath a thin skull cap, jaggedly cobbled together, as if very little in the way of service was expected from the stitches, demonstrates anything of her old vitality. It pulses; or does Chloe only imagine it?

  Her old enemy, brought so low. Chloe finds that there are tears in her eyes. Marjorie sits beside her mother, stroking the limp but still graceful hand. They who in good times so seldom touched each other. Helen would certainly not have allowed it in life, as she does, perforce, in this half-death of hers.

  Marjorie It was good of you to come. And Grace was here earlier.

  Chloe Of course we came.

  Marjorie No of course about it. We were none of us all that much help to each other.

  Chloe (Surprised) We do what we can.

  She whose garden rings with the oaths of Inigo, Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope.

  Marjorie We should interfere more in each other’s lives, and not just pick up pieces. I should go and shoot Oliver, and you should commit Grace to an insane asylum, and as for me, you should have got me to a marriage bureau a long time ago. See how it all ends—

  Marjorie indicates her mother, and snivels.

  Marjorie They say she can go on for weeks like this. I’ve got a taping today and I’m just not at the studio, am I?

  Chloe Of course you’re not.

  Marjorie I just don’t care about it.

  Chloe You will again.

  Marjorie I don’t think so, somehow. How am I going to live without her, Chloe? I have no children. She’s all the family I have.