by Fay Weldon
‘Did I bring her up like this?’ Scarlet asks her mother, ‘or is it the world in which she lives?’
‘I see nothing wrong with her,’ says Wanda. ‘She lives in the present, that’s all. She means to be free and happy now, not some time in the future. You and I lived by saying “one day I am going to”. Byzantia says “Now! Let’s go!” It’s much healthier.’
Helen is entranced by Byzantia, and Byzantia likes Helen, and will go over to Helen’s Wembley Park flat on Saturdays to visit; they will take Alice for walks in the park, and feed her ice-creams, or bring her over to tea with Scarlet, or with Jocelyn. But mostly Byzantia likes the ritual of having tea with Helen—the white embroidered table-cloth, the flowered porcelain cups and saucers, tiny cucumber sandwiches, the iced cake, the afghans—little chocolate biscuits with a half-walnut on top of each—and Alice finely dressed and curled. Alice is a rather nervous, chattering little girl, who breaks into dance when she thinks no one is looking, bowing and swaying like a very young sapling swept by a gale.
Helen has tried. She has done what she can do to build a new life. She goes to parties, makes friends; allows herself to be taken out, wooed, even bedded. But there is a dusty film over all experience. She sees with dead eyes, hears with dead ears. She moves herself through the world like a puppet. She pulls strings to make herself dance, go to fortune-tellers, play with her child.
Presently X seeks her out. He says, ‘Let us be friends,’ and stays the night from time to time. Helen’s nightie is yellow scattered with white stars. She pretends she is a girl again. She pulls the strings that make her love. She loves. If anyone asks her, she says she loves.
He says, ‘Perhaps one day we will get married.’
‘When?’ she asks.
‘When we have grown new skins,’ he says, ‘renewed ourselves like the snakes we are. It takes seven years, I believe.’
They go on holiday to the Isle of Skye. Helen climbs a mountain, stands on the edge of a precipice and teeters.
‘Not here,’ she says, presently.
‘Not here,’ he says. He hasn’t moved. ‘Besides, look at the sky. It is beautiful.’
Helen looks at the dusty sky.
‘Besides,’ he says, ‘who would look after Alice? I have no gift for children. I do not like them.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Who would look after little dusty Alice?’ and he thinks he has won. His other children live with a sister of Y’s, whose husband is an ex-R.A.F. man. They run a paper shop in Essex.
After the holiday he goes back to the village and his Barbara, who never has visions of self-destruction, or urges to suicide. She is shocked at the very thought. When she is depressed she makes jam or a batch of cakes. ‘I have my own ways of being creative,’ she says, and he finds such presumption amusing and even touching.
‘One day,’ he says to Helen—he visits her once a month or so, when he has business in London, ‘we will live together. We might even marry, with the full rites of the Church.’
‘When?’ she asks.
‘One day,’ he says. He no longer talks about Y. Helen thinks it might be true. One day he will marry her. Days slip into days. Now when she looks in a mirror, she sees herself as dusty, too, not just the world around her. She has been in mourning for too long. She complains to Scarlet.
‘It’s no good,’ says Scarlet. ‘You must break with him, never see him again. The world is full of men. You have so much to offer. You are still young; you are handsome, Alice is an asset, not a liability.’
‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I am thirty-six. I am going off.’
‘Your life is only half-way through.’
‘I am not interested in the second half.’
‘You need to meet a proper man.’
‘There is only one man for me, and that is X. I cannot get interested in the others. God knows I try. I went out to dinner with a young man; and there was a woman at the next table who looked familiar. I realized it was Y. It wasn’t really, of course. How many tall pale women there are in the world; I’d never realized. After that I had nothing to say to him, and he lost interest. When there is something so enormous to be said, you see, which can’t be said, then silence is the only possibility.’
‘Stay to dinner tonight,’ says Scarlet. ‘Meet some more people.’
‘I must go back to Alice,’ says Helen. ‘I like to be there at her bedtime.’ She is growing closer to Alice. When they go walking, they hold hands. Helen is more and more reluctant to be separated from her.
‘I wish Alice had been born a boy,’ she says. ‘What kind of life is it for a girl? I am thirty-six. Being young lasts so short a time. Do you really see me as an old lady?’
‘So am I thirty-six,’ says Scarlet, ‘or nearly. But I don’t feel it as you do. Life goes on. It gets better, even.’
‘You were—forgive me—very plain when you were a girl. Life has got better for you as you went on. Mine has been a falling away. You are accustomed to living unadmired, but loved. I have only ever had admiration, and envy. Now even that will be taken away from me. I am to be left with nothing. I have achieved nothing in my life. I should never have survived. I should have died with the others.’
‘I hope,’ says Scarlet, ‘you won’t do anything silly.’
‘Kill myself? Why not?’
‘Because of Alice.’
‘Ah yes,’ says Helen. ‘That’s what everyone says. Does one want life for one’s children? Can one?’
‘Of course,’ says Scarlet, shocked.
‘The pain so outweighs the pleasure,’ says Helen.
‘Not for everyone,’ says Scarlet. ‘You feel like that now. You probably won’t tomorrow. Anyway you have no business to feel it for Alice.’
But Helen does not look convinced.
‘If only he would marry me …’ she says.
‘It would make no difference,’ says Scarlet. ‘Your happiness must come from yourself. It will never come from others.’
Helen smiles politely: it is a beautiful smile, as always, although disbelieving. These days Scarlet almost loves her.
X has an exhibition of paintings in a London gallery. It opens on a Saturday. He spends the Friday night with Helen; he asks her, not Barbara, to be with him at the opening. She meets him at the gallery.
No one speaks to her. All these years after Y’s death, she is still shunned, abhorred and witch-hunted. She doesn’t mind much. Their hatred too has a dusty flavour. X is surrounded by admirers, swooped on by ageing vulture ladies with large sad eyes. He ignores Helen: he behaves as if she was a stranger, as if he had brought her with him to prove how much of a stranger she is. She is an episode in his past, no more. His life goes on from strength to strength. Helen goes home alone. X does not visit her the next day.
Instead Y walks beside her, holding her hand, explaining how Helen can stop crying. Byzantia is supposed to be coming to tea. Helen half hopes she will arrive, half hopes she won’t, so that Y will fade again into the wallpaper. Byzantia does not arrive.
Helen puts Alice to bed. Alice, hot and restless, grizzles and cries, and disturbs her conversation with Y. Y is being very kind.
‘It should have been you and me,’ Y says. ‘Not you and X. You would have been my daughter. Well, it can still be like that. The world is an imperfect place. The only perfection is death, silence, and completeness. One fights it too much, too hard, and too long. Will you join me?’ In the next room Alice cries. ‘What about Alice?’ asks Helen.
‘Alice? Alice should never have been. Listen, how unhappy she sounds. She has no lawful place in the world.’
Helen goes into Alice’s room, and gives her half a sleeping pill. Alice drifts happily into sleep.
‘Millions of people are born every day,’ says Helen. ‘Other millions die. What does it mean?’
Y smiles as if she knew.
‘What do I mean when I say “I”?’ asks Helen. ‘I wondered that when I was six. I still don’t know. All I know is that I is the bit tha
t suffers, and without the I there would be peace.’
Y says nothing. Really, there is no more need.
‘I cannot bear to wake up another morning, knowing that the day will hold no pleasure, only pain,’ says Helen, ‘and that the next day when I wake it will be just the same, except I will be a little older, a little further down the path I am now obliged to travel. I can look back over my shoulder, but that is all. I cannot turn, and go back the way I came, which was through green grass and flowers, bright days, and black nights with brilliant stars. I want to finish now, sit down and fall asleep, while these good things can still at least be seen when I look back. Soon I will have travelled so far they will have faded altogether.’
Y nods. Helen thinks her friend is getting impatient. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘I will be with you soon.’
She goes into Alice’s room, shuts the windows and turns on the gas; she does not ask Y in, but sits there patiently by herself, not unhappily. She feels she has been half-dead for so long that the difference in state will not be very great.
14 DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN
DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN.
‘A million housewives every day—
Pick up the goods, forget to pay—’
And then presently stand in the dock, respectable, brazen, tearful, villainous or confused as the case may be. It was a mistake, it was my nerves, it’s the pills the doctor gives me, I’d had a row with my husband. I wanted it. Well, if not that, I wanted something, I don’t know what. All I know is I haven’t got it.
You can clean and tidy a Council flat in half an hour. You can shop down the Supermarket in another half hour. What kind of achievement is that? Where are the wolves to be kept from the door? Where are the lice to be picked from the clothes? What pleasure is there in the sliced plastic bread, compared to the loaf you’ve made from the flour you had to sleep with the miller to get?
So says Jocelyn. Jocelyn now lives in a Council flat with a printer. He is a card-carrying communist, which is an old-fashioned thing to be, but then he is a romantic man; not a Trotskyite, a Marxist, not even a Maoist, but a Stalinist. He knows it is folly; so does she: there is splendour in such misplaced loyalty. They are happy. She is entranced by the crudeness of his language, the violence of his passions. She watches him scrub his dirty nails as he cleans up after work. He gazes in admiration as she reads, and listens when she talks. They spend a long time in bed together. He despises advertising, and laughs at Philip. She met him in a café, and within six weeks had joined him in his flat. She took Edward with her, who was not pleased by the move.
Almost, she left the child with Philip; but then her courage failed her. She hopes Edward will grow to look more like her Ben and less like Philip, but he shows little sign of doing so. She has a daughter now, Ben’s child, with Ben’s dark eyes and strong features. She loves her daughter, and calls her Sylvia.
She once gave to Scarlet the following account of her parting with Philip:
‘It was the day Helen died. I’d had a phone call from the police. They’d found my number in her address book. I shouted and swore at them over the telephone; I think they were shocked. Or perhaps they’re used to it, I don’t know. Then I abused Helen to them, a good deal. I was angry about Alice. I would have looked after her; well, any of us would. Afterwards, I calmed down, and cried for Helen, and then I wanted to talk about it all, very badly, but the only person I wanted to talk about it to, was Helen herself. We would have had such a rich female conversation, and dissected everyone’s emotions, and tried to decide what it all meant. And now she had deprived us both of this pleasure. Perhaps they were right, and she was always just a mean, wicked woman? But no, she was my Helen, and as I grew older I grew fonder and fonder of her; as you did, Scarlet. And now, quite suddenly, she is just someone who lived and died in the past. As for Alice, well, I can hardly bear to think about that. Sometimes I think how wicked, how terrible, how monstrous of Helen. She was of course insane. She must have been insane if there is to be any forgiveness. But at other times I think no, that wasn’t madness, that was sanity. She did the right thing. For what kind of life would Alice have had? And if, as I think happened, death became to Helen not the absence of life, but a real and positive state, she would want to take Alice with her. She became a better and better mother as time went on.
‘Philip came home that evening troubled and anxious, and waiting to be asked why. But I wouldn’t ask, at first. I was angry with him because when I rang him up at the office to tell him the news of Helen’s death, all he would say was “Oh yes? Oh dear. Well, I’m rather busy, I can’t talk now.” He was beginning to believe, you see, that advertising campaigns were the only real things in the world. Or perhaps he was just too angry, with me, and himself, to take anything real in. We had been having money troubles. He was making five thousand a year but I was making us live at the rate of at least eight.’
‘You sound quite pleased about it,’ says Scarlet.
‘I was. While I was living with Philip I was a very disagreeable person. Now I live with Ben I am quite nice and reasonable. It was sex, of course, the whole thing, although I would have been horrified by the suggestion at the time. If I couldn’t get what I needed in bed—while denying the need for it, of course—I’d bloody get what I could out of him in other ways. Poor Philip.
‘Anyway, I finally gave in that evening and asked Philip what the matter was. He had an important New York client in town, it transpired. He had arranged for a call-girl to spend the night with the client, but the girl had developed ’flu and called off. All his other normal sources were useless, he claimed; not only was there a ’flu epidemic, but London was bursting with conferences and randy big-businessmen, and the city’s high-class sexual resources were strained to their uttermost. You can’t give a big-businessman just anybody, you know. The girls have to be well-spoken, mannerly, and of course, free from disease—or the whole thing becomes sordid.
‘ “Why Philip,” I said. “I had no idea you were a pimp.”
‘Now of course I knew he was. Executives are expected to see that clients have a good time, and having a good time includes girls. I did not myself believe, at the time, that Philip shared in these good times. I thought not only that I, in some mysterious way, was responsible for his impotence, but that the harm I did him would pursue him wherever he went.
‘When I made my joke about the pimping, Philip became quite violent. Perhaps he was more upset by Helen’s death than I thought. At any rate that evening we both behaved out of character. Or perhaps, indeed, for once, in character.
‘ “You don’t care if I go bankrupt, do you?” he said. “People lose accounts for this kind of thing. And if I lose accounts I lose my job, and you lose everything. Because all you care about is bloody money. You don’t care about people.”
‘ “Yes, I do,” I said. “You’re talking about yourself. I just wish I was married to a successful pimp, not a failed pimp.”
‘(You must remember how mild, polite and decent we normally were to each other, to appreciate the full trauma of this conversation.)
‘ “You are a frigid, anti-sex, English bitch,” he said. “And a liar. You make my life a misery. You are against pleasure in every form.”
‘ “I have not much chance to be anything else,” I said, “being married to you.”
‘ “Bloody nonsense,” he said. “You’d be the same, with anyone.”
‘ “You are wrong,” I said. “I know for a fact how wrong you are.”
‘ “Whore,” he said. “Slut.”
‘ “All right,” I said, “if that’s what you want to believe, that’s what I am. You are quite right; I only care about money. I would sell myself for money. Come to that, I would be perfectly happy to give myself away.”
‘ “Prove it,” he said. “You go along. You spend the night with him.”
‘That silenced me. I left the room.
‘One of the things which made me continue to see sex as a kind of life force,
and not—as I am sometimes tempted to believe in these days of pornographic advertisements and see-through dresses—a feeble human activity which needs all the artificial fostering it can get, is the way the nearness of death compels one to make love. And I say make love, that old-fashioned word, not fuck, on purpose. But who had I to make love to? If it can’t be the former, the latter will do. Or so I thought in my rage.
‘I drank a quarter bottle of Scotch in the kitchen, and went back to Philip.
‘ “Very well,” I said, speaking the jovial language he best understood, “for the sake of Britain and the export drive. Lead me to him.”
‘I did not believe that Philip, my husband, with whom I had shared, albeit without satisfaction, so many beds, breakfasts, holidays, mortgages, bills, cars and wallpapers, would actually undertake anything so extreme or definite. But he just smiled, this pale, limp, weary ad-man, and with a confidence I had never known in him before, led me upstairs to the bedroom. I think it was that he had, on that instant, ceased to see me as a wife and now saw me as a whore, and he was quite at ease with whores.
‘He went through my drawers as if he knew them well, and I wondered if examining them had perhaps been one of his secret pleasures. He selected black underwear for me, and dressed me in it, and made me look at myself in the mirror, turning my head so that I was obliged to see.
‘ “You would pass for twenty-five,” he said. He would not let me wear a dress; he made me wear a raincoat over the underwear. As for me, I felt alternately foolish, excited, and embarrassed. I could not imagine now what our future together would be. I saw, and rightly, that our marriage was ended.
‘We went by taxi to a large hotel. In the lift he said, “I was lying about the girl having ’flu. She’s still waiting for the telephone call. I wanted you to do it. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.”