by Weldon, Fay
Official auditors and executors move in. The house is sold to meet bills. Susan takes the flat below Wanda’s. Simeon is taken from his prep school and goes to the local school; he is bullied for a time, but only until his accent loses its eccentricity and he becomes like the others. He is happier for it. His dull eyes become quite bright. So do Susan’s, being daughter, wife and mother to Wanda. She gets a job as a shorthand typist. Her life begins. Her eyes stop popping.
Some six months after Kim’s death Susan has a nervous telephone call from a woman called Alison. She says she is Kim’s ex-secretary. She has in her possession some fifty paintings done by Kim over the past eight years. What should she do with them? Wanda goes, on Susan’s behalf, to inspect the paintings.
Alison is fifty; a grey-haired, plain, peaceful, stoical woman. Kim has been visiting her daily for years: to paint, to talk, to make love. She has asked for nothing better. She has never wished to marry. But she had thought perhaps Susan was entitled to the paintings.
‘You mean,’ says Wanda, ‘you wanted to make your presence felt.’
But she knows it is not true. Alison is not like that. Alison is a pleasant woman and simply wishes to be obliging. Wanda has never felt more at a disadvantage. The paintings, she suspects, are very good indeed. She leaves them with Alison, who has no idea, one way or the other, of their quality, and who in the end puts them in the Methodist Jumble Sale.
13
Solutions
Down among the women.
Let us now praise fallen women – those of them at any rate who did not choose to fall, but were pushed and never rose again.
Let us praise, for example, truckloads of young Cairo girls, ferried in for the use of the troops, crammed into catacombs beneath the desert floor. More crowded even than Paul’s battery hens, as plucked of fine feathers and as raw of breast, and even more diseased. Where is their Ministry of Agriculture official, where their vet, where their Marketing Board? Where are their post-war treats; their grants, their demob suits, their cheering crowds? Come reunion day, where have they gone? Lost to syphilis, death or drudgery. Those girls, other girls, scooped up from all the great cities of East and West, Cairo, Saigon, Berlin, Rome. Where are their memorials? Where are they remembered, prayed for, honoured? Didn’t they do their bit?
Let us now raise a monument in the heart of the London Stock Exchange. Let us call it the Tomb of the Unknown Whore. Let the Queen pay homage once a year. Whose side is she on, anyway? The men have taken the top-of-the-milk, and left us with whey for our cornflakes.
So at any rate says Helen, when Scarlet calls to visit her, to show off her wedding ring and photographs of beautiful Byzantia.
X is having an affair with the wife of a neighbour. Her name is Barbara. He does not trouble to hide it from Helen. He paints Barbara naked, and takes Barbara, not Helen, to Private Views.
When Helen protests all he can say is ‘Now you know what Y felt like. Stay quiet and put up with it, as you expected her to do.’
‘Do you want me to die too?’ asks Helen.
‘That’s up to you,’ he says. ‘You carry death with you, in any case. I knew that, from the moment I first saw you.’
Helen, looking at herself in the mirror, sees that he is right. When X is away at night, and the blackness of the country closes round the cottage, and the silence mounts, it is death she hears creaking the floorboards and the beams, and death who rustles the leaves against the windows. She is frightened now of the supernatural, as she has never been frightened of anything alive. She will pick the baby Alice out of its crib and sit rocking it against her breast hour after hour, and then become frightened to even pull back the shawl and look at her child, in case it stares back with Y’s eyes, suckles with Y’s mouth.
‘Do you want me to go?’ she asks X.
‘No,’ he replies, and falls silent again.
‘I can’t live like this,’ she tells him.
‘You must live as you wish,’ he replies. ‘It is nothing to do with me. We are bound together by Y’s death. It is not up to me to break those ties.’
‘It is your fault as much as mine,’ she says, and he laughs, loudly and shockingly, at the absurdity of such a notion. They both accept that it is not true. Y’s death is established as Helen’s fault.
X thinks that Helen is turning from a domestic into a wild animal. She has become gaunt: her lips stretch back over teeth that seem too large: the whites of her eyes show unnaturally. She seems to him to lurk in dark corners, embodiment of all reproach. She is his punishment. He will not turn her away for fear of something worse.
He is fearful of Alice, who mews and suckles like a little animal. She too is monstrous, he thinks, with her tiny, blind searching head. He has relief only when he is with his Barbara, whom he sees as a calm, pleasant, stupid woman. She has no imagination. To her a table is a table, a death is a death. Barbara disapproves of Helen, and believes in saying what she thinks.
‘She is a femme fatale, that’s all,’ says Barbara. ‘One day you will grow out of her, and you will stop feeling so depressed. In the meantime, of course, you are painting beautifully. Perhaps the strain is good for you?’
Barbara does not really want the situation altered. Why should she? She has such status now as she has never dreamt of. A successful farmer for a husband, and a famous artist for a lover, and the black beast Helen, snarling in her corner, defeated.
‘You can’t stay,’ says Scarlet to Helen, for tales of Barbara have drifted back to London. Helen is still seen as the witch-woman, but Scarlet is now on Helen’s side. ‘You must leave. There are more men in the world.’
‘Things may get better,’ says Helen. She is wearing what seems like many chiffon scarves. When she moves, she drifts in a waft of fabrics. They flutter round her strong, bony, tough-skinned face. She has become very thin.
‘You are fixated on that man,’ says Scarlet, ‘and what is he? Just another man.’
‘He has become my life,’ says Helen. ‘I have invested everything of me in him. I have nothing left but him.’
‘Well,’ says Scarlet briskly, ‘I am not in love with him, and see him quite clearly. He is self-indulgent, conceited, sadistic, and as neurotic as all get out. None of it’s real.’
‘Y dying was real,’ says Helen. ‘I saw the certificate. In fact, do you know, I registered the death. No one else could bring themselves to do a sordid thing like that. I always have to do the dirty work, the same as I have to deal with Y’s ghost. While he’s off having a good time somewhere else.’
‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ says Scarlet.
‘I can’t leave him,’ Helen repeats. ‘He is my existence. Anyway, I can’t until he asks me to go. He may need me. I inspire him, I always have. His work is more important than my feelings.’
X comes home and ignores Scarlet, except to nod curtly to her as he passes through the living-room to his bedroom. He shuts the door firmly.
‘He is not inspired,’ says Scarlet, ‘he is mad. I’ve been mad in my time, so I can tell. You’ve been a bit odd, but never mad. You owe him nothing. For Alice’s sake, get out. You are a mother now, not a woman. What kind of a father is he to her?’
There was a time when Scarlet never used to interfere in other people’s lives. As she gets older she realizes more and more that she knows best.
‘Where would I go?’ asks Helen. ‘How would I live? I have never been without a man. I have always been someone’s mistress. It will not suit me to be an unmarried mother.’
‘I was one of those too,’ says Scarlet, ‘and every year it gets easier.’
‘You don’t understand,’ says Helen, helplessly. ‘I have never been responsible for anyone except myself. I can’t start now. I can’t do anything new. Only the same as I did yesterday.’
Scarlet is shocked by the change in Helen.
‘You’re like someone in prison,’ she says. ‘You’ll die if you stay.’
‘All my family died in prison,’
is all Helen will say. ‘Mother, father, aunts, uncles. My sister. Why should I be different? I don’t mind dying, or prison. Better late than never. Off to the great kibbutz in the sky.’
Scarlet wants to slap her.
‘I was joking,’ says Helen feebly.
‘Give me Alice,’ says Scarlet. ‘Go on being as wicked as you like, but let me save Alice.’
‘There is no saving her,’ says Helen smartly. ‘She is doomed, she is female… What’s more,’ Helen adds dismally, ‘she is mine.’
And she sinks again into lethargy, sitting slumped in her chair. She raises her hand and points.
‘Here she is,’ says Helen. ‘Here comes Y.’
And Scarlet goes quite cold, because it is true that a pale stooping figure is coming up the drive. It is only the girl who delivers the milk, as Helen must surely know, for the milk is delivered at the same time every evening.
Scarlet takes it upon herself to knock upon X’s door, go in, and tell him that Helen needs a doctor as she is having a nervous breakdown.
‘A doctor?’ enquires X, apparently bemused. Then he laughs and says, ‘We don’t need doctors. We need priests. We will exorcise her.’
And as if on cue he leaves the bed on which he lies and broods, and strides off to the local library, where he is a celebrity, in search of a book on exorcism.
‘Look here,’ says Scarlet to Helen, ‘he is going too far. Are you just going to sit here and be exorcised?’
‘Not in such a cut-price fashion,’ says Helen, with what seems like returning spirit. ‘Not by him. Am I not even worth a priest? Who does he think he is?’
‘Come to London with me,’ says Scarlet.
‘No one will talk to me in London,’ says Helen. ‘They blame me.’
‘It may surprise you,’ says Scarlet, ‘but there are at least fifty million people in the country who have not heard of X, Y or you.’
‘I am so old,’ says Helen. ‘Old as death. No one will want me.’
Scarlet takes Helen’s bony hands in hers.
‘Y once stroked my hair and brought me back to life,’ says Helen. ‘I do not think that you can do the same for me.’
All the same she allows her hand to remain in Scarlet’s, and gazes at it fixedly. And Scarlet, conscious of her own years in the darkness, tries to transmit, by simple touch, some of her own harshly-acquired strength. Scarlet is generous. She wishes to share. She is prepared to give at least a portion of her own happiness away. And it is, indeed, as if the dark tide begins to recede from Helen’s brain as she holds Scarlet’s hand. Her mouth, which has been so tautly held, relaxes into what is almost a smile.
(‘I made death leave her,’ says Scarlet to Jocelyn later, ‘just for a little.’ And Jocelyn nods politely, rather embarrassed, and thinks, but does not say, what many other people also think, that if only Scarlet had left Helen alone, matters might have been a good deal better.)
‘All right,’ says Helen, unexpectedly. ‘I shall come to London. Quick, quick. We must be gone before he comes back. He will kill us.’
And she runs up the narrow staircase to her room, and starts gathering her things together, quickly, quickly. Scarlet helps. How white the linen, how fragile the underwear; how Helen’s fingers caress and care for them, automatically, even in this extremity of fright. For now Helen has decided to go, her fear of X is sudden and extreme. For their very lives, it seems, they must be gone before he returns.
Scarlet wonders for a disconcerting moment whether Helen intends to leave the baby, but Scarlet has misjudged her friend. Helen stops to scoop up Alice as she leaves; wraps her in a snowy-white, beautifully washed shawl. Now they half-walk, half-run, over ploughed fields towards the station. Their shoes are clogged with mud.
Scarlet does not dare look back, for fear of seeing X looming on the skyline; she has invested him, in the space of just ten minutes, with supernatural powers. Threading through her fear is a vein of excitement. She is running away again. She has always run away, and always found it exhilarating. There has always been, with Wanda, a new school, a new father, a new flat to run to; later a new man, a new baby, a new life. Every new event ensures a host of old ones thrown out, run away from, left undone. She remembers what it felt like to be a naughty little girl; excited by disaster and her own wilfulness.
And here she is, a grown woman, stumbling through muddy fields, still at it.
‘Nothing changes much in life,’ Scarlet observes, panting.
‘Don’t say that,’ says Helen. ‘It is too depressing a thought.’ The station is in sight. Sanity returns. They walk demurely now. Helen nods graciously to the villagers, who stare back, either in non-comprehension, or in unabashed hostility.
‘I very much hope that change is possible,’ says Helen. ‘I have spent my life so far amongst enemies. As a child I was hated and feared as an enemy alien. Later I grew beautiful and was disliked for that. Then I loved too fixedly – and people don’t like such constancy, it frightens them. It indicates there is a purpose and a doom, a plan beneath the chaos. It is too strong a concept for ordinary people, who can only love for a minute at a time.’
‘Like me,’ says Scarlet.
‘There are excuses for you,’ says Helen, charitably. ‘You have difficulty surviving.’
On the train she chatters about the fate of women, plans a tomb to the Unknown Whore, and says she will set herself up as a painter of portraits.
She stays for a while with Scarlet and Alec in their comfortable house, and is much attached to Byzantia.
‘She is a lovely girl,’ says Helen. ‘You see what good things can come out of so much trouble? Do you remember when we all promised to pay you ten shillings a week? We never did. There was no time. Life caught up with us too fast.’
And she rocks her own baby and changes its clothes unceasingly, and curls its wispy hair with her finger, and waits for X to come and take her home. He does not come.
One day she says to Scarlet, ‘I saw Y in the street the other day; I have to leave here. X won’t come, so she has come instead. I know I am talking nonsense, but I also know I have to leave.’
Scarlet thinks that Helen is being kind and making excuses; that the desire to go is on Scarlet’s account. For Helen has been eyeing Alec with automatic lust. It is not that she really likes or desires him; just that she is unused to being without a man. Scarlet is confident enough that Alec will not return Helen’s interest, for Alec is made nervous by intensities of feeling. All the same, Scarlet catches herself opening doors as if fearful what she might find, and she has a pale, watchful, stooping feel, as if Y’s mantle was falling across her shoulders. So she does not resist.
‘Yes,’ she says to Helen. ‘In that case you had better go.’
Alec finds Helen a flat in Wembley Park. It will not be ready for a month, so in the meantime Helen stays with Audrey in her love-nest.
Audrey’s love-nest is a pretty Georgian house in St John’s Wood, which Audrey has deigned to allow her magazine Editor to buy, decorate and furnish for her. She is very unkind to him. She has, she maintains, had her fill of men, domesticity, sex and children. The more elusive Audrey is, the more admiring of her he becomes. She insists on having other lovers – and condescends to allow the Editor to visit her for the night, perhaps once a week – or once a fortnight if he has displeased her.
‘You are such a bad lover,’ she says, ‘it is really an ordeal for me. Paul was very, very good in bed. It was just he was so impossible out of it. You’re fine out of bed, but not really much good in it. So don’t get above yourself. Because you choose to pay out money on my behalf doesn’t mean you own me. I can look after myself. I once ran a chicken-farm single-handed. I am afraid of nothing. Not poverty, not loneliness, not your wife.’
He gazes at her in admiration, and buys her another dress, another holiday, organizes a still better job for her to play with.
It is not true to say that Audrey is afraid of nothing. She is afraid of Paul. Paul assails her
and the Editor through the post and in person. He paints obscenities on her walls and his car: he throws stones with rude limericks engraved upon them through the windows: he makes phone calls to her employers and the Editor’s Board of Directors. He threatens murder, and mutilation. He prophesies madness and suicide. He is not angry (he says) because she has deserted him; in fact, he maintains, he has done really well since she left, and even the hens, relieved of her baleful presence, have been laying splendidly – but at the outrage to principle, the despoiling of his vision of womanhood, inherent in her abandonment of the children.
Audrey is both flattered and frightened by these attentions.
‘I never knew he loved me so much,’ she says. And to the Editor – ‘You could never love anyone as deeply as that.’
The Editor protests when Helen comes to stay, disturbing the grossly flimsy structure of his idyll.
‘It is none of your business,’ says Audrey. ‘I have who I want here, and what’s more Helen and me will share a room. I like talking in bed, and you’re always too tired or too drunk or too randy for proper conversation. You’ll just have to stay out.’
Forced into his wife’s company, evening after evening he finds it the more boring.
‘I wish he would go back to her,’ says Audrey to Helen. ‘I don’t want him. I just want to be myself, like you. I don’t want to be married, or do housework. I just want to have a good time, and earn money, and have lovers until I’m too old. Then I’ll take to drink like Scarlet’s mother.’
The Editor calls one evening when Audrey is out to dinner with a television producer. He sits and talks to Helen. Audrey, returning, finds them sitting peacefully and at a distance discussing Russian icons, and has a fit of hysterics. She screams at her Editor, belabouring him with her fists, accusing him of infidelity, and drives him physically from the house. Afterwards she sobs and weeps for hours.