‘We considered calling it a wage,’ said Laing, ‘but we realised that whatever the level it was fixed at — and naturally we hope to improve this — it would be an insult. We also considered calling it an allowance — but that sounded like pocket-money, to be withdrawn at will.’ He smiled. He seemed to be growing more confident on television, exhilarated by the lights and the thick snaky wires. ‘We decided to call it Benefit,’ he said, ‘because that is what we are all going to do.’
Chapter 4: Marsha
The early years of the Benefit scheme in Britain were watched with interest all round the world: by economists, social policy planners, churchmen, mothers, demographers — and particularly by two middle-aged feminists who, after fifteen years of travelling the world, spreading the message of women’s liberation and earning tidy sums of money from freelance article-writing and television appearances, had now settled in Sydney, Australia, to write a book.
At least — it was Posy, the Australian, the elder of the two, who felt settled and was writing the book. It was a misnomer to talk of the women's movement in the singular; feminists in different countries responded to their different conditions, often appearing to contradict each other, which annoyed her. But Posy felt she had an overview. She knew there must be a unifying factor, something that would bring together the middle-class career women of the United States who wanted to share their husbands’ privileges, and the peasant women of the Third World who gave national liberation higher priority than sexism, and show them they were all on the same side. Posy wasn’t quite sure what this unifying factor was; she saw the business of discovering it and putting it in her book as her life’s work — that, and offering herself as leader of the mass movement to overthrow the patriarchy that would surely result. The fact that feminists in the countries she’d visited had unanimously rejected her pretensions (seeing her variously as a Western plot, an Eastern plot or a male plot to split the movement) did not bother her overmuch. She had Marsha — who, although she argued a bit and grumbled a lot, still stuck with her, kept her going.
The sun hung high over the Sydney beach. The skin of both women was tanned deep brown and leathery by their years of travel. Bronzed men surfed into the shore on curling waves; pretty women lifeguards perched on high lookout points scanning the sea for shark-fins, a job more decorative than dangerous now that the worlds’ fisheries had virtually destroyed the species. The high buildings of the city crept closer and closer to the shore; and in the parts of the beach not marked and patrolled for leisure use by the rich, shanty-towns were spreading.
Posy was a big, impressive woman. A rigorous life of physical self-sufficiency and roughing it and fitness training had prevented her muscle from running to fat, even now in her fifties. She wore a swimsuit that she had knitted for herself out of brown string, and two pairs of sunglasses, one over her eyes and one spare pair nestling in her grey bush of hair. She lay flat on a sturdy beach-bed, surrounded by beer-cans, sandwiches, books, recording equipment and litter. Her head was propped on a pile of newspapers. A second pile pressed down on her stomach; as she scanned each one she either marked an article with a slash of red pen and handed it to Marsha to cut, or placed it, muttering, behind her head, which thus rose higher and higher, doubling and trebling her chin.
She turned to Marsha, who was fiddling with the long grey hair that framed her face like curtains. Marsha sat very flat on the hard beach, her bony legs sticking straight out in front of her. All her life she’d had the nail-biting, face-rubbing, hair-twiddling gestures of an anxious adolescent. The papers she was meant to be cutting piled up untouched. The notebook in which she was supposed to be writing down Posy’s ideas was closed on her lap. She was staring out to sea in one of what Posy liked to mock as her stocktaking moods. Marsha’s mind was always years behind her body. She was only just used to being out of her twenties (to not feeling included when people talked about ‘the younger generation’) and here she was, forty-three! ‘Save your stocktaking till you’re my age,’ Posy would say sometimes, adding silently, ‘and until you’ve done everything I’ve done.’ Marsha wondered why she let Posy bully her so much, but she knew really. She wondered why she always had to be her assistant, and she knew that too. It was because Posy had saved her; when she’d been young and rich and made gloomy by her uselessness, and panicking over the hideousness of the only two roles that the future appeared to offer a girl in her position (housewife, or hard, peculiar career-lady) Posy had hauled the women’s movement into her life, and shown her that you didn’t have to accept anyone’s view of yourself but your sisters’ and your own.
And that wasn’t all; Posy had saved her from the oddly compelling relationship with David Laing which, had she pursued it, would now have her as the behatted, multiparous wife of a cabinet minister who had become a reactionary of the most terrifying kind. Posy had saved her. And even if they slept together more for company than love-making (which was still hedged about with embarrassment, inhibition and good manners, probably because they never discussed it) it was better than David. Posy was a reassuring bulwark in the bed, and it was good to have someone who stayed with you, someone with whom you felt useful.
‘Marsha, have you heard a word I’ve said?’
‘Er, sorry, probably, remind me.’
‘Er sorry probably remind me. You don’t have to help me but please say if you’re not, otherwise I assume you are and get let down. I’ve been giving you things to cut, and I’ve been letting my thoughts come at random on the assumption that you were writing them down. You’re good at writing notes on my thoughts, Marsh. You have this knack of spotting nuggets in the dross.’
‘What’s it about? I probably heard.’
‘If you had, you’d be jumping up and down with indignation. Those new birth-control hormones — you know, the ones that work so nicely in the brains of rats and black women — now turn out to be, guess what, carcinogens. Nine countries repealed their anti-discrimination laws last year, and another nine decided to let women be conscripted on the same terms as men. Oh, and the pope’s made another of those speeches on clitoridectomy.’
‘Must respect the practices of cultures different from our own?’
‘Got it in one.’ Posy gave her a friendly hit with a newspaper.
‘That’s awful.'
‘You sound as if it’s awful, you really do sound as if you think it’s awful,’ Posy grumbled. ‘I think we ought to do Britain now.’
Marsha stretched lecherously. ‘Lucky old Britain.’
‘What have we got on the feminist response to Benefit over the past four years?’
‘Here, now, in the middle of the beach, nothing.’
‘At home in the file.’
Marsha screwed up her face, trying to help. ‘According to the British newspapers there hasn’t been one and everyone thinks Benefit is wonderful. According to such feminist stuff as reaches us, the movement hasn’t quite made up its mind what it thinks.’
Posy groaned. ‘Get something on it, would you?’
‘What, now? I’d rather have a swim.’
‘The sharks'll get you.’
‘There aren’t any.'
‘The ones on surfboards. Make yourself useful, for heaven’s sake.'
That did it. Marsha scowled and lay back. Make yourself useful, Marsha had been a refrain from her childhood. The aunt who had brought her up on the death of her parents was an inexorably useful woman — taking in an orphaned niece was only the tip of the iceberg. The house rattled with collecting tins, burgeoned with jumble, echoed with coffee-mornings. The causes varied with the week and blurred into one in Marsha's memory — blind cats, lepers, nuclear disarmament, the promotion of good things and the destruction of bad. Marsha might have respected her aunt if she’d been less compulsive about it all — if she’d seemed to enjoy, or even believe. In the early consciousness-raising sessions in Collindeane Tower, she’d had fun mimicking the aunt’s smug exhortations, but it always hid a little hurt. Posy knew thi
s, and knew she wasn’t allowed to say make yourself useful, Marsha other than in situations of perfect peace and harmony, and then only in unambiguously joky tones.
Marsha shut her eyes against the dazzling sun. She tried to imagine London. It would be winter. She tried to feel rain and dusty mist on her skin. What on earth was it like there, with David Laing now empowered to impose on a nation of women the ideas he had once sought to impose on her?
‘If I apologise,’ said Posy, looming through the gold light behind Marsha’s eyelids, ‘will you please help me write my book?’ Marsha peered at her and she winked. Marsha couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Posy, there are few more ridiculous sights in the world than you flirting.’ She hadn’t meant to hurt but Posy flinched so she supposed they were quits. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘What can I do?’ And thus are all our arguments settled. What a ratty old couple we are. We might as well be married.
‘I think I’d like to interview you.’
‘Me?’
‘Well, you do have what we might call a unique insight on David Laing.'
‘I’ve told you — I mean, I don’t have to — it’s embarrassing —’
‘Come along, now, Marsha, the personal is political.’
Marsha wished she’d stuck to the quarrel.
No one had understood what she saw in Dave. They didn’t see him when his ineffectiveness made him desperate, when vulnerability tempered his bitterness. ‘My casework is the kiss of death, Marsha. A quiet talk from me to a juvenile pilferer and he turns into a bank-robber. And if I offer what’s laughingly known as support to a family with a mad granny at home, the next thing I know, the family’s done a bunk and granny’s dead of hypothermia.’ He would rage about Seyer Street, the drunken fathers, the slovenly mothers, the prostitutes, the frightened gays. ‘These people live like animals, but why should they change? By my very existence, I’m saying, there there, it’s not your fault, not your responsibility. And people like you chime in with the chorus: it’s society’s fault! Blame it on the social services, you all cry, which is a wonderful formula, isn’t it? The social services. In other words not me! No fear! I’m not going next door to tell that woman to stop beating hell out of her kid! That’s the social worker’s job! I don’t need to do anything now and what’s even better I don’t need to feel one iota of guilt when the kid’s in its coffin, because it’s society’s fault! Marsha, there’s a girl we’re going to put into a brand new flat because she’s got a baby and another on the way! And meanwhile married couples who’re waiting to be housed before they start their families carry on waiting! How can I tell that girl she ought to control herself? And how can I not?’
He would rant like this till she reached a climax of hating him, and then, sensing this, he would seem to turn. ‘I remember a lecturer when I was at college. Just one lecture stuck in my mind. The village idiot. It sounds like a joke. We all laughed. But the village idiot is what it all ought to be about. The village could accommodate a mentally handicapped person. He was as much a part of the community as the doctor or the parish priest. He had his hovel. He had his job, he gleaned corn and tolled the bell at funerals. He wandered about, people looked out for him, nothing really bad could happen. It’s different now. He can’t roam the streets as he roamed the village green, a bus’ll have him. Even if he is in a village, he can’t help with the harvest — the threshing machine’ll take his arm off. He’s intolerable in a tenth floor flat. There’s no room ... he must be put away ... yes, I know what you’re thinking, romantic rubbish, and you’re right too. The village idiot raped young virgins beneath the harvest moon, and for every one that made it in society ten were dropped down the well at birth. Do you think I like thinking like this? I just can’t see any way out, and I won’t think in slogans ...’
He would shake his head, sip his coffee, talk more gently; and she would get glimpses of his kindness. ‘I sat with him till he calmed down,’ might mean he had spent a night in a slum with a drunk, unpaid; ‘I lent her a few pence,’ could mean anything; and his cry, ‘What else could I have done?’ seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the heart.
His voice faded. Posy was interviewing her.
‘David Laing, as I remember him, was something of an idealist.’
Posy made an exploding sound with her nose.
‘Anyway,’ Marsha ventured, ‘If we want to know what’s going on in Britain, there is one way to find out.’
‘We’ve been into that,’ said Posy briskly.
‘Posy, it’s been years, and it’s my home.'
‘I thought you’d made your home with me.’
‘Yes, but —’
‘There’s no yes but. I said when I left England that the women’s movement there would never achieve anything because they wauldn’t structure the thing and have effective leadership, and nothing I’ve heard since has convinced me any different. I’ll go back when they invite me, and not before.’
‘Posy — we’re ridiculous.’
‘Speak for yourself. ’
But the idea of going home, just for a visit perhaps, grew in Marsha and spread like a germ; just to see — oh, the white cliffs of Dover and Buckingham Palace, the black waters of the Thames at night, never mind the more personal things. It worried at her. She said nothing to Posy, allowed her to think the subject had been dropped. She turned to her researches with a will and, as part of the work on Britain, wrote to Lynn Byers.
The reply when it came was happy to have heard from Marsha, but listless.
It seemed that Lynn, who had been trying to get pregnant when Marsha and Posy left, now had a twelve-year-old daughter. The daughter’s name was Jane, and she suffered from a hereditary illness called cystic fibrosis. Lynn’s tone was brisk. Both she and Derek must have been carriers. The disease primarily affected Jane’s lungs and she needed a lot of care at home if she were to lead a normal life. It meant that Lynn hadn’t been able to combine career with motherhood to quite the extent she had hoped. Nevertheless, Jane was as well as could be expected, intelligent and pretty. Derek was well. And so was Lynn. Jim, their foster-son, had gone back to his mother.
It was as if Lynn kept a tight rein on herself while she wrote about personal things. Her tone relaxed as she moved on.
‘You ask about the women’s movement. I don’t see much evidence of it, quite honestly, but then I don’t go out of my way to look. All the old splits have hardened. The socialists are more socialist. The moderates joined we’re-all-on-the-same-side FAMILY. (Well, I didn’t, but some did.) The radicals and the lesbians and the separatists just moved out. They say FAMILY’s an attack on lifestyles, and lifestyles are where the struggle’s at. Well. You can believe that, or you can think it sounds a nice excuse for getting the hell out of boring old politics and going to a commune and raising hens. (They raise them to the tenth floor in Collindeane Tower, I kid you not.) What’s funny is that they say Benefit (which oh yes is what you asked about) is a bribe, but they’re happy to take it. A lot of them have children now and their Benefit’s a handy income for the ‘moneyless’ economy of the women’s communes. Pardon me if I sound cynical ...
‘What else do you want to know? Oh, there’s lots, birth-rate figures (going up, surprise surprise), texts of speeches (you heard about you-know-who and the Wrong Rats), sociological surveys, but I can’t get it together, I only do occasional dull local paper stuff, all the old skills and ambitions are gone, but best not to think of that; I have new ones, like keeping my daughter alive to adulthood, physiotherapy to help her breathing ... I am not sorry for myself, I love her and it’s okay. Derek is lovely and a professor and famous, or so he keeps telling me. Why don’t you come home and see, for heaven’s sake? I thought you’d vanished, except I kept reading silly things about you in the papers. I was over the moon to get your letter. I’ve written so many to you, in my head and on paper but I couldn’t ever send them because I never knew where you were ...’
‘That poor little girl. I think I’ll go bac
k,’ said Marsha.
‘Goodbye then.’ Posy was reading the letter and didn’t look up. ‘Call herself a journalist? There’s nothing here, nothing.’
‘Come with me, we’ll find out, get involved.’
‘I’ll come when I’m asked.’
‘I’m asking you.’
Posy found this beneath consideration. They stopped discussing it. Posy changed the subject every time it was raised. She worked on all the sections of her book except the British. She bullied Marsha as much as usual and several months passed before Marsha screwed up her courage and said, ‘One berth or two?’ Posy refused to reply and Marsha went and booked a single and made sure Posy knew.
‘Of course you realise it’s classic,’ said Posy.
‘What is?’
‘Lured away from your political commitment by an appeal to your maternal feelings. ’
‘Ridiculous!’
‘Ridiculous, is it? Maybe it’s something else, then? Which one, I wonder? Lynn or David? Fancy being the politician’s wife after all, do you? You always did like to pick and choose.’
It was Marsha’s turn to ignore Posy, but Posy warmed to her theme, kept calling her Mrs Laing. They were still quarrelling when their last night came. Ostensibly Marsha was still trying to persuade Posy to change her mind, but she was also growing weary of her. She was leaving to get away from her, and she guessed Posy knew, maybe was glad. But they had had some good times. Marsha tried to put all the good times into their last lovemaking.
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