Down Among the Women

by Fay Weldon

‘Pity about its eyes,’ she says, for Simeon’s lids are still encrusted.

  ‘Keep it away from Byzantia, if you please,’ Wanda adds.

  ‘What’s wrong with its eyes?’ Scarlet is sharper than ever in defence of her child, but no one replies.

  ‘You should be lying down,’ says Kim to Susan, and then to Wanda—‘she should be lying down, shouldn’t she?’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ says Susan, ‘I just want to be at home.’

  ‘She wants us out of here,’ says Wanda.

  ‘She wants nothing of the kind,’ says Kim. ‘Do you, darling?’

  Susan does not reply.

  ‘The baby’s hungry,’ says Susan.

  ‘Then feed it,’ says Scarlet. ‘I feed Byzantia almost all the time, and she never cries.’

  ‘I can’t,’ says Susan. ‘My milk’s dried up. It’s on cow’s milk and just brings it up all the time anyway. Really, I just want to jump out of the window. I mean, that would be the simplest thing for everyone.’

  There is silence. No one disagrees with her. Susan’s spirit begins to return. Since no one else is going to look after her and her baby, she will clearly have to do it.

  ‘I’d like to get things organized,’ she says firmly. She looks crossly at the disorder on the baby’s table. In the hour since the day nurse has left Wanda and Scarlet between them have created powdery and greasy chaos amongst the unguents and cotton wools, ‘And I must have somewhere to put the baby,’ she adds. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘there’s only really room for one baby in this flat.’

  She trembles. She has never made so definite and aggressive a statement in her life. She doesn’t like herself for being unpleasant, but she knows when she has to be. She stares obstinately at the ground.

  ‘I expect you are right,’ says Kim sadly, his vision of future entertainment evaporating. He puts his arm round Susan. He has undertaken her. He will go through with it. The prospect of himself tormenting Wanda, and laying Scarlet’s girl-friends, departs. Susan snuffles cosily into his shoulder.

  Scarlet, Byzantia and Wanda leave. Byzantia snuggles down in the dresser bottom drawer.

  Kim lifts Susan’s face to welcome her home properly.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she says. ‘Just don’t touch me.’

  She has never said a thing like that before.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Scarlet, ‘Byzantia would only have caught some terrible disease from that baby.’

  ‘Her uncle,’ remarks Wanda.

  ‘The relationship doesn’t reflect much credit on her, I’m afraid. Did you see its eyes? And such a funny-shaped head. Do you think it’s all right?’

  Wanda has never before heard Scarlet speak so disagreeably of strangers.

  6 PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

  DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN. There’s a flasher in the park, a poor pale middle-aged man, who lets his trousers down to little girls. The little girls are shock-proof, or appear to be. ‘Seen better than that at home,’ they cry, and jeer, and he slinks off. They don’t tell their mothers, whom they know will get upset and phone the police. And though the children like excitement and the sudden rush of policemen and dogs into the park, they quite like the flasher too; he carries his own excitement with him, stepping out unexpectedly from behind trees, and they don’t wish to forgo it. Not yet, until they’re bored.

  Two of the little girls pass by. I know them well, infant thieves. Cat-toothed Christine, six, and squinty-eyed Theresa, five. They wear their mother’s shoes, her shrunken jerseys; they carry toy handbags; they wiggle their hips. ‘Blood everywhere,’ Christine is saying, ‘under the table and over the telly and they had to take a hose to the ambulance.’ And Theresa nods, sage and horrified, as her mother would, and says, ‘They sewed me up with stitches once because my arm was coming off.’

  ‘How many?’ asks Christine.

  ‘A thousand,’ says Theresa.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ says Christine, ‘I had seven hundred and thirty-two when my head nearly came off.’ They enjoy themselves. They will never join the girls. They were born down here among the women. They were born scavengers and vultures. Christine and Theresa, one day, tiny, dusty and old, will fight each other at the jumble sale; not for an old jersey for sixpence—who wants that?—but because they don’t want the other to have it.

  Alice and Regina pass, sisters. They aren’t whores. They don’t get paid. They’re on drugs, I think. I know their mother, she’s going mad with worry; she keeps threatening to put them in care. Alice is fourteen, Regina sixteen. Camp-followers, groupies, gangsters’ molls, revolutionaries’ birds, what’s the difference? The perks are much the same, and one is being useful to and used by those one most admires.

  A well-dressed woman passes. I don’t know her. She is middle-aged and hatchet-faced. She is talking to herself, mutter, mutter. She is angry. She wears a flowered hat. I think I know what she wants. She wants to hang, flog, behead, draw, quarter, stone, shave, guillotine. She wants her revenge. If she came across the flasher she would have him publicly castrated, and wield the knife herself.

  I am sure her house is clean. I am sure there is not a speck of dust anywhere. The cleaner the house the angrier the lady. We are the cleaners. We empty the ashtrays which tomorrow will be filled again. We sweep the floors which tomorrow will be dusty. We cook the food and clean the lavatory pans. We pick up the dirty clothes and wash and iron them. We make the world go round. Someone’s got to do it. When she dies it will be said of her, she was a wonderful wife and mother. She cooked a hundred thousand meals, swept a million floors, washed a billion dishes, went through the cupboards and searched for missing buttons. She muttered, but we will miss her.

  Down among the women, we don’t like chaos. We will crawl from our sickbeds to tidy and define. We live at floor level, washing and wiping. If we look upward, it’s not towards the stars or the ineffable, it’s to dust the tops of the windows. We have only ourselves to blame.

  ‘Yes, God,’ we say, ‘here’s your slippers and your nice hot dinner. In the meantime just feed us, keep us, fetch the coal and say something nice while you’re about it.’

  Audrey and Helen share a flat. Audrey doesn’t do housework. She is something of a slut. She will clean if she has to, for the sake of a quiet life, but her heart isn’t in it. Men, observing her domestic habits, feel there is something unnatural here. Women feel the same. They resent her freedom. Such cleaning as she does is man-orientated: when the man drifts away, so does Audrey’s capacity for domestic action. Dirty knickers pile up on the bathroom floor; bread gets cut on the sideboard and the crumbs are left for the mice.

  Helen, on the other hand, has a gift for domestic grace. Where she moves, there is beauty. She will put one flower in a jam jar and make the arrangement remarkable; she will open her trunk and bring out embroidered oriental fabrics with which she will cover cushions and make curtains. She will lay a table nicely and fold paper napkins into pretty shapes. The food tastes better.

  The arrangement, by which Audrey pays the bills and Helen blesses the flat with her orderly presence, works well enough while, as it were, it is not overlooked.

  But now Paul is complaining to Audrey—not without justification—that Helen is exploiting her, and X is complaining because they have to pass through Audrey’s bedroom to reach Helen’s—thus being confronted by what he feels to be the mating of inferiors—and tensions arise. Harsh words are spoken, not to each other, but to mutual friends. Helen says of Audrey, ‘She is a mercenary slut,’ and implies it is Audrey’s lack of breeding that makes her complain that Helen keeps the electric fire on all night, so that X will be able to step out into a warm room.

  (Y has entered an art competition. It rather looks as if she might win it. There is a prize of £1,500. X would have liked to compete but clearly can’t enter into direct competition with his wife. She put her entry in without telling him. He is nervous and angry, and only feels at ease and himself when immersed and active in Helen. He does not tell Y wher
e he goes at night: he is angry when questioned. And Y, who feels she has done him a great wrong by entering the competition, does not have the heart to persist in enquiry. At least he comes home in the mornings, and has had breakfast, so she does not have to make him coffee and delay starting her work. She has never worked better. He, so far as painting is concerned, is alternately frenetic and apathetic, and accomplishes very little.)

  Audrey says of Helen, ‘If she can afford new clothes, she can afford to pay the electricity. Why doesn’t she get a proper job? And he’s a married man, she should think of that.’

  All the same, in bed with Paul, listening patiently as he talks, Audrey watches X’s dark figure as he goes through to Helen in the inside room, and she envies. X, she knows, she feels, will not demean himself with words, as Paul does. X belongs to a romantic world; she cannot aspire to it. Audrey was born below stairs with legs, she rightly fears, too short even for Emma-Audrey to be able to climb to more rarefied regions, where Paul cannot pursue her. Yet she longs; she desires; she finds X’s brief disdainful presence by her bed more erotically stimulating than a whole half-hour of Paul’s patient verbal stirring and dextrous manipulations. To be taken, seized and left is all she wants.

  Paul finds these midnight intrusions insupportable. He is no painter, no writer, no poet—his pottery is stern and practical; he tries and tries, but cannot achieve more. He makes do with creative diatribes against X’s painting—and affords Y faint praise. He despises and lusts after Helen, and prophesies that she will come to a bad end.

  His proposal to Audrey still stands, but he does not press it. Why should he? He has, rash fellow, got her a job on a woman’s magazine. She loves it. She is animated, heady with competence. She sneers at the editor, the caption writers, the art directors—alters copy and headlines as she types. She can do better than anyone, she knows. Paul listens and laughs. At the office she is known as Emma. He feels quite safe. In the evenings he teaches her to cook, how to listen to music; he gives her exercises in pornographic writing and marks them out of ten. She models for nude photographs, but finds that this gives her stomach pains. These frighten him; he desists.

  One day Emma’s Editor sends a memo round the office saying the magazine is to carry no more fiction. Up and down the corridors there is uproar. The Editor, quite clearly, has misinterpreted the findings of the new Readership Research Department. Will anyone tell him? No, he is too bold and angry a man. He hires in a minute, fires in a second. What’s this? Little Emma? Pattering up to the Editor’s desk, telling him he’s a fool? He smiles, re-instates fiction, and promotes Emma. It’s like a fairy story. Now she’s head of the story section. She takes writers out to lunch. At home, she is found to be intolerable. She talks of nothing but inter-office politics; Helen yawns, X declines to turn up at all. (Y thinks, ‘you see, patience and tact has won him back’.) Paul gets fearful headaches from nervous irritation. This is not what he had meant at all.

  Paul asks Emma to marry him. Of course, she will wish to stop work. If they are to be together, it must be totally, inseparably, day as well as night.

  Emma hesitates. Emma has written home boasting about her new job. She’s making good. Her parents reply with a crude request for £53, money they once had to send to supplement her County Award while she was at college.

  Emma agrees to marry Paul. Emma needs shelter. Paul won’t let her send a penny home. Emma, he says, must break off all relationship with her family completely, start life anew. She is only too glad to do so. They will move to the country, to Suffolk (no editors in Suffolk, no lunches, no taxis, no expense accounts, none of the seductions of office life); they will run the pottery business together. Emma’s good at typing and invoicing. She will be very useful. They will live as near to nature as the U.S. Air Bases in the area will allow. She will bake home-made bread, and have a herb garden. He will have a little conservatory for humming-birds—always his ambition. It sounds entrancing. Emma hands in her notice.

  It is a Registry Office wedding. Audrey dreamt in her vulgar way of hymns, a choir, white veils and bow ties; Emma knows better. She scoffs and giggles quite openly at the Registrar’s few kind words, as he misguidedly tries to make the ceremony more than a legal transaction. Her mother wanted to come—Paul won’t let her, and Emma is grateful.

  Paul’s brother Edward is there—a schoolmaster with bad asthma. He seems to find Paul mildly ridiculous, which upsets Emma. Scarlet is there, her ring finger greener than ever. She carries little Byzantia. Helen comes; so do Jocelyn, and Sylvia and Philip. So does Paul’s first wife. Who asked her? Why, Paul.

  One way and another Emma is glad when the day is over, and she can retire to bed with Paul, who celebrates the occasion by making love for an hour and a quarter, timed with his stop watch; including preliminary love play of the duration of, from the first pinch of the ear lobe to the last blow into the nostril, and the final delicate fingerings, an hour and twelve minutes.

  Truly he is remarkable.

  After a few months of Suffolk life Emma either stops getting stomach pains or grows used to them. Presently she stops dreaming of X.

  Helen cannot afford to keep the flat going, now that Audrey has gone. She confides her troubles to Y, of whom she now sees a lot. She loves to wander in X’s territory when he is not there, to wash his coffee cup, read his letters, hide her head among his clothes, sit in his chair, see his family as he must see them. She loves Y because she is part of X. Sometimes she loves X because he is part of Y. Y seems to her more and more beautiful; a pale, quiet, thin woman with light eyes fringed by lighter lashes, and long thin legs. Her paintings are sad and powerful. Helen wants to smooth Y’s wispy hair out of her eyes, make her cups of tea, help her relax, smile, be happy. Yet when X appears she is in a frenzy of impatience, waiting for him to find some dark place and overwhelm and satiate her.

  Y no longer suspects Helen. She believes X has lost interest in Helen, found some other newer light of love, and is now even sorry for her. So she puts up with Helen’s continual presence in her household; Helen talks too much in too naïve a way, Y thinks, but she is useful with the children.

  ‘If I had any money I would help you out,’ says Y to Helen, ‘but I haven’t. Not unless I win this prize, which isn’t likely.’ But she knows in her heart she will win it.

  Helen stays for supper quite often. They all eat black-eyed beans and bacon, talk of art and artists: of teachers at the Slade, Camberwell and the Central. There are lots of friends, there is lots to drink, they make their own beer and wine. They live cheaply but well. They strip the paint off unfashionable furniture and discover the beauties beneath. They are young; there is a duffle-coated resurrection in the air.

  Presently, of an evening, X will get up and leave. No one asks where he is going: they know he likes to work at night, anyway. And then when the others go, Helen goes too.

  Or sometimes she stays a little longer to comfort Y.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about it,’ says Helen. ‘It means nothing. It’s you he loves. There is so much in him to give, it’s not surprising he needs more than one woman to keep him going, is it? How can a man like that, a major creative talent, be expected to keep bourgeois rules? It would be death to his painting. You are so lucky to be his wife,’ adds Helen, and Y smiles her tight, small, faded smile and says nothing.

  ‘You’re all so talented,’ complains Helen. ‘I wish I could do something. I’m a parasite, that’s all. I must have a symbiotic relationship with the great, or die.’

  ‘The great? X, great?’ Y is amused.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Helen is quite serious. ‘So are you,’ she adds as an afterthought.

  Y denies it. But she looks at her husband a little differently after these talks with Helen, and is even less inclined to challenge him. How can she, so small, so ordinary, so everyday, have the right to the totality of his being? She must be grateful for what he can bestow: she must not feel distress when he seems to need more than she can offer. Sexual jealousy is
a mean, horrid, destructive emotion. Helen keeps saying so.

  ‘If you really love someone,’ Helen keeps saying, ‘you want them to be happy and free.’

  And presently Y hasn’t the courage to reply, as once she did, ‘No. I want them to be mine.’ She tries to be generous and noble. X makes love to her as frequently as before, but she feels he is angry—whether with himself or with her she cannot tell.

  ‘The sensible thing for a wife to do,’ says Helen, ‘is to make it easier for a husband to take his extra-marital pleasures when and where he feels inclined. I mean, what is the real danger for a wife? Not that the husband will be unfaithful, but that he will find love elsewhere. Men don’t leave home for sex, they leave home for love. And we all know that sex denied soon turns into love. A husband’s infidelity should be seen as an enriching of the marriage, and encouraged. He brings something extra home.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Y, sarcastic, ‘so long as it isn’t V.D.’

  ‘Penicillin,’ says Helen, ‘will put an end to V.D. once and for all.’

  All the same, in spite of the knowledge that Helen is young and foolish, Y is influenced. A letter arrives. Y has won the prize. £1,500. Y hides the letter for days. But it will be announced in the newspaper soon. Y will have to tell him. She waits till he is in a good mood and Helen is out of the house. She has the feeling that Helen’s presence irritates him.

  ‘I have a present for you,’ she says all at once. ‘I have won that prize, I have the cheque, and I have bought you a studio flat. It is just around the corner.’

  ‘A flat? What for?’ He is astounded.

  ‘You might find it easier to work there,’ she says. ‘And models, and girls and things.’ Her tongue can scarcely get round the words, but she manages. ‘Really, you see, I don’t mind. You mustn’t think I do. I’ll go on loving you. It’s just a kind of nervous twitch, really, with you. I know. This sex thing with other women. Well, I mean, it’s you, isn’t it? I married all of you.’