by Weldon, Fay
‘Don’t you think,’ she said presently, ‘don’t you think somehow life’s awfully sad?’
‘In what way?’ he asked, when he’d given some time to considering the question.
‘Just growing older,’ she said, vaguely, already fearing she sounded silly. ‘And what’s it all for?’
There was a further silence at the other end of the line.
‘Who’s the client?’ he asked.
‘Avril le Ray.’
‘Oh, her. She always upsets you.’
‘She’s so tragic, Gregory!’
‘She brought it on herself,’ said Gregory. ‘Now I must go and take the pie out of the freezer. It’s always better to heat them when they’re thawed out a little, isn’t that so?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and they said goodbye, and hung up.
Avril was ten minutes late for her appointment. She’d been crying. Her mouth was slack and sullen. Melted blue eye shadow made runnels down her cheeks. She insisted on sitting in the corner where one of the old-style mirrors still remained from before the last renovation. Avril claimed it threw back a kinder reflection and it probably did, but Avril sitting in front of it meant that Helen was obliged to work with her elbow up against the wall. The neck of Avril’s blouse was soiled with a mixture of make-up, sweat and dirt. And she smelt unwashed. But Helen, to her surprise, found the smell not unpleasant. Her Nan had smelt like that, she remembered, long ago and once upon a time, when she’d put little Helen to bed in a big, damp feather bed. Was that where the generations got you? Did they merely progress from chaos to order, dirt to cleanliness? Was that what it was all about?
‘Remember when I had long hair?’ said Avril. ‘So long that I could sit on it! I played Lady Godiva in the town pageant. I was in love with this boy and he said if I wanted to prove I loved him I would sit on the horse naked. So I did. Listen, I was sixteen, he was seventeen, what did we know? My mother wouldn’t speak to me for months. We lived in the big house, had servants and everything. What a disgrace! She was right about one thing: I failed my exams.’
‘What about the boy?’ asked Helen. Whole-head root-bleaches, the kind Avril wanted, were old-fashioned, but were less finickity than the more usual bleached streaks. Helen could get on quite quickly at this stage.
‘He was my one true love,’ said Avril. ‘We’d never done anything but hold hands and talk about running away to get married. Only after I played Godiva he never wanted to run any further than behind the bicycle shed. You know what men are like.’
‘But it was his idea!’
Avril shrugged.
‘He was only young. He didn’t know what he’d feel like later, after I’d gone public, as it were. How could he have? So I went with him behind the bicycle sheds. It was glorious. I’ll never forget it. The sun seemed to stop in the sky. You know?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen, who didn’t. She’d only ever been with Gregory and someone else whose name she preferred to forget, at a party, a sorry, drunken episode which had left her with NSU – non-specific urethritis. Well, that’s the way it goes. Fate reserves these unlikely punishments for the virtuous who sin only once, and then either get pregnant or catch a social disease. And she’d only ever made love to Gregory at night, so how could she know about the sun stopping? But at least it was love: warm, fond and affectionate, not whatever it was that ravaged and raddled Avril.
‘Anyway, then he broke it to me formally that he and me were through. He’d met Miss Original Pure and planned to marry her when he had his degree. I thought I’d die from misery. But I didn’t, did I? I lived to tell the tale.’
‘I do look a sight, don’t I?’ Avril said, staring at her plastery hair, but her mind was on the past. ‘It was funny. I stood in front of that full-length mirror, at the age of sixteen, and tried to decide whether to do Godiva naked or in a flesh-coloured body-stocking. I knew even then it was what they call a major life decision. Naked, and the future would go one way; body-stocking, another. I chose naked. Afterwards I cried and cried, I don’t know why. I’ve always cried a lot.
‘Then of course I couldn’t get into college because I’d failed my exams so I went to drama school. I got no help from home – they’d given me up – and I couldn’t live on my grant, no one could. So I did a centre-spread in Mayfair, perfectly decent, just bra-less, only the photographer took a lot of other shots I knew nothing about and they were published too, and got circulated everywhere, including in my home town. I tried to sue but it was no use. No one takes you seriously once you take your clothes off. I didn’t know – well, I guess I was trying to take advantage of him, too, in a way, so I can’t complain. And I can tell you this, if the sun stopped behind the bicycle shed, that photographer made the whole galaxy go the other way. Know what I mean?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Helen, testing a lock of Avril’s hair: the bleach was taking a long time to take. She wondered whether to ring Gregory and remind him not to try to mend the kettle, or whether the reminding would merely make him the more determined to do it.
‘Do I look as if I’ve been crying?’ asked Avril, peering more closely into the mirror. ‘Because I have been. This guy I’ve been living with: he’s a junkie trying to kick the habit. He’s really managed well with me. He was getting quite – well, you know, affectionate – that’s always a good sign. He used to be a teacher, really clever, until he got the habit. Young guy: bright eyes, wonderful skin – didn’t often smile, but when he did… Notice the past tense? When I got home from work this morning he’d vanished and so had my rent money. It gets you here in your heart: you can’t help it: you tell yourself it was only to be expected, but it hurts, Christ it hurts. I shouldn’t have told him I loved him, should I? Should I, Helen?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Helen. She told Gregory she loved him quite often and there seemed no sanction against it. But perhaps the word, as used by her, and by Avril, had a different meaning. She rather hoped so.
‘So you only love people who hurt you?’ she asked, cautiously.
‘That is love, isn’t it?’ said Avril. ‘That’s how you know you love them, because they can hurt you. Otherwise, who cares? How am I going to live without him? Just lying in bed beside him: he was so thin, but so hot: he was so alive! It was life burning him up, killing him. Just life. Too strong.’ Tears rolled down Avril’s cheeks.
She looks eighty, thought Helen, but she can only be my age.
‘Anyway,’ said Avril, ‘I want a new me at the end of this session. Pick yourself up and start all over, that’s my motto. Remember when you cut off all my long hair? That was after the Mayfair business; I didn’t want anyone to recognise me, but of course they did. You can’t cut off your breasts, can you? I got picked out of the end-of-the-year show by a director: very classy he was, National and all that, and he and I got friendly, and I got the lead but I wasn’t ripe for it, and the rest of the cast made a fuss and that was the end of me; three weeks later, bye-bye National. And he had a wife living in the country somewhere, and it got in the papers because he was so famous, and none of his friends would hire me, they all sided with the wife, so I got a part in a Whitehall Revue and did French maids for five years. Good wages, nice little flat, men all over the place: wonderful dinners, diamonds. You wouldn’t believe it, like in a novel, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know what is me, come to think of it. Perhaps no one ever does. I wanted to get married and have kids and settle down but men just laughed when I suggested it. I had a blonde, back-combed bob in those days. Remember?’
Helen did. That was in the days when you used so much hair spray on a finished head it felt like a birds’ nest to the touch.
‘Then I had a real break. I could always sing, you know, and by that time I really did know something about theatre. I got the lead in a Kurt Weill opera. Real classy stuff. You did my hair black and I had a beehive. How we could have gone round like that! And I fell in love with the stage manager. God, he was wonderful. Strong and silent and public school, and he really went
for me, and was married, and I’ve never been happier in my life. But he was ambitious to get into films, and was offered a job in Hollywood and I just walked out of the part and went along. That didn’t do me any good in the profession, I can tell you. And I kept getting pregnant but he didn’t want us tied down so I’d have terminations, and then he went off with the studio boss’s daughter: she was into yoga, and they had three kids straight off. He complained I could never sit still. But I can, can’t I? You should know, shouldn’t you, Helen?’
‘About as still as anyone else,’ said Helen, and took Avril over to the basin and washed the bleach off. She hoped she hadn’t overdone it: the hair was very fine and in poor condition and the bleach was strong.
‘I left them to it; I just came back home; I didn’t hang around asking for money. I never do that. Once things are over, they’re over – I didn’t have any children: why should he pay? We gave each other pleasure, didn’t we? Fair exchange, while it lasted. Everything finishes, that’s the bottom line. But I never liked beehives, did you?’
‘No. Very stiff and artificial.’
‘I wept and wept, but it was good-times while it lasted!’ Avril examined a lock of hair.
‘Look here,’ said Avril, ‘that bleach simply hasn’t taken. You’ll have to put some more on and mix it stronger.’
‘It’s risky!’ said Helen.
‘So’s everything!’ said Avril. ‘I’m just sick of being hennaed frizz: I want to be a smooth blonde again.’
Helen felt weary of the salon and her bank account and her marriage and everything she valued: and of her tidy hair and sensible shoes and the way she never took risks and how her youth had passed and all she’d ever known had been in front of her eyes, and fear had kept her from turning her head or seeing what she would rather not see. She re-mixed the bleach, and made it strong. Avril would be as brassy a blonde as she wished, and Helen’s good wishes would go with her.
‘Well, of course,’ said Avril, cheerfully, ‘after that it was all downhill. Could I get another acting part? No! Too old for ingénue, too young for character and a reputation as a stripper, so Hedda Gabler was out. And frankly I don’t suppose I was ever that good. Met this really nice straight guy, an engineer, but he wanted a family and I guess my body had got tired of trying, because I never fell for a baby with him, and he made some nice girl pregnant and they got married and lived happily ever after. I went to the wedding. But how was it, I ask myself, that she could get pregnant and still stay a nice girl, and I was just somehow a slut from the beginning?’
So late, thought Helen, and the perm not even begun. Gregory will have gone to bed without me – will he notice? Will he care?
‘So now I sing in nightclubs; I’m a good singer, you know. All I need is the breaks and I’d really be someone... I do the whole gamut – from the raunchy to the nostalgic, a touch of Bogart, a touch of Bacall. Those were the days, when love was love. And I tell you, Helen, it still is, and the only thing I regret is that it can’t go on for ever – love, sex. The first touch of a man’s hand, the feel of his lips, the press of his tongue, the way the mind goes soft and the body goes weak, the opening up, the joining in. I still feel love, and I still say love, though it’s not what men want, not from me. Perhaps it comes too easily; always did. Do you think that’s what the matter is?’
When Helen took Avril to the washbasin and washed the second lot of bleach away, a good deal of Avril’s hair came with it. Helen felt her hands grow cold, and her head fill with black: she all but fainted. Then she wept. Nothing like this had ever happened before, in all her professional career. She trembled so much that Avril had to rinse off what was left of the bleach from what was left of her hair, herself.
‘Well,’ said Avril, when it was done, and large areas of her reddened scalp all too apparent, ‘that’s the bottom line and the sharp end. Nothing lasts, not even hair. My fault. I made you do it. Thirty years of hating me, and you finally got your revenge!’
‘I never hated you,’ said Helen, her face puffy and her eyes swollen. She felt, on the other side of the shock and horror, agreeably purged, sensuous, like her Nan’s little girl again.
‘Well, you ought to have,’ said Avril. ‘The way I always stirred things up in here. I just loved the look on your face!’
After a little Avril said, ‘I wonder what my future is, as a bald nightclub singer? I suppose I could wear a wig till it grows again, but I don’t think I will, it might be rather good. After the Godiva look, the Doris Day look, the Elizabeth Taylor look, then the Twiggy look – the frizz-out, the pile-up and the freak-out – none of which did me any good at all – just plain bald might work wonders for a girl’s career.’
A month later Avril le Ray was billed in Mayfair, not Soho, on really quite tasteful posters, and Helen, bravely, took Gregory around to listen to her sing. They went cautiously down into the darkness, where Avril’s coarse and melancholy voice filled out the lonely corners nicely, and a pink spotlight made her look not glamorous – for truly she was bald, and how can the bald be glamorous? – but important, as if her sufferings and her experience might be of considerable interest to others, and the customers certainly paid attention, were silent when she sang, and clapped when she’d finished, which was more than usually happened in such places.
‘How you doing, Kiddo?’ asked Avril of Helen, after the last set, going past on the arm of a glowing-eyed Arab with a hooked nose, waving a truly jewelled ring, properly set in proper gold. ‘Remember what I told you about the bottom line and the sharp end? Nothing lasts, so you’d better have as much as you can, while you can. And in the end, there’s only you and only them, and not what they think of you, but what you think of them.’
In the Great War
Enid’s mother Patty didn’t stand a chance. That was in the Great War, in the fifties, when women were at war with women. Victory meant a soft bed and an easy life: defeat meant loneliness and the humiliation of the spinster. These days, of course, women have declared themselves allies, and united in a new war, a cold war, against the common enemy, man. But then, in the Great War, things were very different. And Patty didn’t stand a chance against Helene. She was, for one thing, badly equipped for battle. Her legs were thick and practical, her breasts floppy, and her features, though pleasant enough, lacked erotic impact. Her blue eyes were watery and her hair frizzy and cut brusquely for easy washing and combing. ‘I can’t stand all this dolling up,’ she’d say. ‘What’s the point?’
Patty cooked with margarine because it was cheaper than butter and her white sauces were always lumpy. She wouldn’t keep pot plants, or souvenirs, or even a cat. What was the point?
She didn’t like sex and, though she never refused her husband Arthur, she washed so carefully before and after, she made him feel he must have been really rather dirty.
Patty, in other words, was what she was, and saw no point in pretending to be anything else. Or in cooking with mushrooms or holidaying abroad or buying a new pair of shoes for Enid, her only child, when she had a perfectly good pair already, or going with her husband to the pub. And, indeed, there very often was no point in these things, except surely life must be more than something just to be practically and sensibly got through?
Enid thought so. Enid thought she’d do better than her mother in the Great War. Enid buffed her pre-pubertal nails and arranged wild flowers in jam jars and put them on the kitchen table. Perhaps she could see what was coming!
For all Patty’s good qualities – cleanliness, honesty, thrift, reliability, kindness, sobriety, and so on – did her no good whatsoever when Helene came along. Or so Enid observed. Patty was asleep on duty, and there all of a sudden was Helene, the enemy at the gate, with her slim legs and her bedroom eyes, enticing Arthur away. ‘But what does she see in Arthur?’ asked Patty, dumbfounded. What you don’t! the ten-year-old Enid thought, but did not say.
In fact, the Second World Male War, from 1939 to 1945, which men had waged among themselves in the name o
f Democracy, Freedom, Racial Supremacy and so forth, to the great detriment of women and children everywhere, had sharpened the savagery of the Female War. There just weren’t enough men to go around. In ordinary times Helene would have gone into battle for some unmarried professional man – accountant or executive – but having lost country, home, family and friends in the ruins of Berlin now laid claim to Arthur, Patty’s husband, a railway engineer in the north of England, who painted portraits as a hobby. The battle she fought for him was short and sharp. She shaved her shapely legs and flashed her liquid eyes.
‘She’s no better than a whore,’ said Patty. ‘Shaving her legs!’ If God put hairs on your legs, thought Patty, then a woman’s duty, and her husband’s, too, is to put up with them.
Helene thought otherwise. And in her eyes Arthur saw the promise of secret bliss, the complicity of abandon, and all the charm of sin: the pink of her rosy nipples suffused the new world she offered him. And so, without much difficulty Helene persuaded Arthur to leave Patty and Enid, give up his job, paint pictures for a living and think the world well lost for love.
By some wonderful fluke – wonderful, that is, for Arthur and Helene, if infuriating for Patty – Arthur’s paintings were an outstanding commercial success. They became the worst bestselling paintings of the sixties, and Arthur, safely divorced from Patty, lived happily ever after with Helene, painting the occasional painting of wide-eyed deer, and sipping champagne by the side of swimming pools. ‘Nasty acidy stuff, champagne,’ said Patty.
Enid – Patty and Arthur’s daughter – never really forgave her mother for losing the war. As if poor Patty didn’t have enough to put up with already, without being blamed by her daughter for something she could hardly help! But that’s the way these things go – life is the opposite of fair. It stuns you one moment and trips your feet from under you the next, and then jumps up and down on you, pound, pound, pound for good measure.