by Fay Weldon
But even Chloe, schoolgirl that she is, knows that Corporal Patrick Bates is no gentleman. The Angel Lucifer before the fall, perhaps, but more an upstart than a gentleman.
Patrick Bates kisses and tells, and worse.
Patrick Bates is twenty-two. His father (he says) was an alcoholic criminal, murdered in a drunken brawl. His mother (he says) is a prostitute in Manchester. And Patrick himself, the child of this ill-omened match, was (he says) brought up by a maiden aunt in Morningside, that genteel suburb of Edinburgh.
Patrick Bates is afraid (he says) of nothing—not of husbands, fathers, brothers or his own nature. He is stocky and strong. He has brilliant blue eyes, coarse reddish hair, and a member (Grace whispers) both powerful and long.
Patrick Bates has the mature ladies of the village in an erotic ferment and the young girls giddy with love. What is this special power that Patrick has, beyond looking deep into the troubled eyes of ladies, and offering them his concentrated and admiring attention? Not, one may be sure, the size of his member (for only Grace, in all the village, knows or cares, let alone speaks, about such things).
Marjorie, later, was to say women felt themselves to be sexually worthy in Patrick’s presence. So intense was his curiosity about all things female, Marjorie maintained, that it quite overrode a woman’s consciousness of being too old, too young, too big in the bust, or too small, too inexperienced or over-experienced, too tight of cunt, too loose, too ready to respond, or too slow, in the simple knowledge that she was female, and that that was quite enough for Patrick.
Grace was to say it was because he didn’t see women as sex-objects, rather himself as one.
Chloe felt, in those days, that he was simply kind, and interested, and concerned. Only later, as youth and optimism fell away, and he got the sweets he wanted and found them ashes in his mouth, did the rumbling wheel of Patrick’s existence jam somehow at its summit, and turn into reverse, depleting the pool of goodwill, stirring up the muddy violence of his beginnings, leaving him revealed as mean, and mad, and malevolent.
Patrick Bates is Entertainments Officer at the local Airforce camp. Because the vicar has high blood-pressure it is Patrick who for a while organizes the village hops, whist drives, vegetable shows, waste paper and scrap metal collections, and so on. He seems surprised to find himself doing it, but as an occupation it is clearly preferable to being say, a rear gunner, whose remains are regularly hosed out of returning aircraft. Patrick has not come so far, so fast, to end in so humiliating a manner, and says so, publicly, in the Cosy Nook.
It is a mark of his popularity and charm that he can say so and still be bought drinks.
Only Edwin Songford, strangely, suspects him in those days, sees the destructive glint behind the smile, and senses the ultimate parasitical design, and has some vague vision of a ravaged future. But who will, these days, trust Edwin Songford’s judgement? The world has changed: Edwin has not. Edwin’s belly is swollen with beer; nightly he waxes hysterical at the notion of socialism, strikes, employment for women: he wishes to extend the death penalty to cover black-market and homosexual offences. When he speaks of his doubts about Patrick, who will listen? Only Esther, who has to.
Mrs Songford accepts her cup of tea from Chloe.
‘Thank you, my dear. My throat is very dry. It has been since that concert. I think I over-strained it then. I daresay Edwin is quite right—one makes oneself a laughing stock. Better not to make the effort, really. And I do worry about my throat. My mother died from an unpleasant disease—one of the spreading kind. It affected her throat. My father used to like us to chew every mouthful sixty-four times, in order to preserve our stomach linings. He was the best of men, but in retrospect I think a little eccentric about diet. And there was no talking at meals. Of course there was nothing mother could do about that, she’d married him, but all the same it was a dismal household. One has a duty to be cheerful and I do try, I don’t want to end up like mother, and I tell myself my troubles are nothing, compared to what our poor fighting men have to put up with.’
One of Esther’s troubles is Grace, now burgeoning into adolescence. Grace creeps out of The Poplars at half past ten, when her mother is already in bed and her father is dragging out his last drink at the Rose and Crown. She waylays Patrick as he leaves the public bar. She walks back with Patrick to the gates of the Army Camp.
What happens on the way?
Who is to say, but Grace has a sly and rounded look, and Chloe begins to hate her, not for the last time in her life, but with more intensity than ever after.
In Patrick’s company Chloe is paralysed. Grace flaunts herself before him: Marjorie entertains him: Chloe can only gaze, dry-mouthed.
All three girls are at the Chelmsford Grammar School. Navy pleated tunics, bunched round the middle (hardly waist) with a cord. White shirt. Striped tie. Panama hats in summer, navy felt in winter, and a detention if you didn’t wear one. Darned black lisle stockings, stout shoes, and in winter, combinations.
Combinations (a word used in the plural, never the singular) were worn next to the skin. They started at the neck and went down almost to the knees. Stiff yellowy-white flannel, scratchy, the neck opening fastened with a row of flabby buttons and stiff buttonholes (tab-lined to prevent fraying) and with two buttoned flaps, one at the front, one at the back, for when the wearer went to the lavatory.
On winter mornings Graces leaves the house wearing her combinations, and takes them off behind the hedge at the bus stop, even when it is snowing.
Marjorie and Chloe prefer to be warm.
Marjorie has stopped writing to her father. Culture seems without meaning. The female spirit, at fifteen, has time for little else but self-appraisal. (Though the Grammar School does its best to deflect it with hour after hour of homework.) A letter comes from Helen in New York, with a PS saying that according to a message from a prisoner of war organization that has finally caught up with her, her father Dick is still alive and still has partial sight in one eye.
Chloe is in love with her history teacher as well as with Patrick. Both loves are hopeless and agonizing, and, she is convinced, perverted.
They can never be spoken of to anyone. She learns to bear things inwardly.
Grace has no intention of bearing anything. She has prevailed upon her mother, at last, to admit that she is sufficiently developed to wear a bra. One is bought. It is marked with the Government Utility Kit Mark. It is stout and functional. For a day or two Grace goes about, like the other girls, with a shelf for a bosom.
It was not uncommon for a nice young man, in those days, on first seeing a woman’s breasts—something which might well not happen until his wedding night—to be horrified by their appearance, having assumed that they were of necessity forward, thrusting, nippleless cones, uniform in every female.
Grace finds the shelf irritating. She boils and boils the stout, unloving fabric in a saucepan, until it is denatured. Then she dyes it black.
The sports mistress spots it one combinationless hockey day, showing quite plainly beneath the open-weave of her Aertex sports shirt.
And thus the conversation goes:
Sports Mistress Grace dear, I don’t think that bra is quite suitable.
Grace What do you mean?
Sports Mistress Nice girls don’t wear black underwear.
Grace Why not?
Sports Mistress Because how would one ever know whether or not it was clean?
Grace By remembering when you last washed it. Besides, if it was black, would it matter? In any case we should all save soap for the war effort. They say men prefer black underwear. Do you think that’s true?
Sports Mistress Only a certain sort of man. The kind of man you will be interested in likes a woman to be spotlessly clean in mind, body and underwear.
Grace Do you really think so? Well, since it’s all such a fuss, I won’t wear a bra at all.
And she doesn’t. Grace, everyone agrees, will come to a bad end. She is all but expelled for b
eing an evil influence on the other girls, but her talent for drawing saves her. They even line the school corridors with her pseudo van Goghs.
twenty-four
MARJORIE, GRACE AND CHLOE. They bled in unison, punctually and regularly for five days once every four weeks, whenever the moon was full. It was a fact of their existence which used to make Grace furious.
‘You’re looking rather peaky,’ says Marjorie, to Chloe, as at last they leave the Italiano. ‘Do you have the curse, like me, or is it the life you lead?’
‘It’s the curse,’ says Chloe. ‘There is nothing wrong with the life I lead.’
‘We were always in time,’ says Marjorie, ‘do you remember? Grace used to starve herself to get out of step but it never worked. Do you think it means anything? Do you think there’s a kind of inner force which drives us all along? Perhaps we have a female group identity, as black-beetles do?’
‘No,’ says Chloe.
‘Do you remember those sanitary towels we used to have? Made of paper which shredded when you walked?’
‘I’d rather not remember.’
‘Do you know what today is?’ Marjorie persists. Chloe walks with her towards the Television Centre, past the rampant infertility of Shepherd’s Bush Green, down towards White City. Their nostrils are filled with diesel fumes.
‘No,’ says Chloe. ‘What is today?’
Ah, today.
Today Chloe’s children—hers by virtue of blood, or obsession or love—mark out a badminton court on an English lawn. They are well fed: they do not have hookworm, trachoma, or TB. Through the television screen they have become acquainted with the concept of violence in all its forms: the nearest they get to its reality is a bomb hoax at school, or a crashed car seen in passing on the motorway. They show little astonishment at their good fortune.
Yet at their births, who would ever have predicted so good a future for them? And they show little understanding of Chloe’s sacrifice in bringing them to this good end—if sacrifice it is, for do we not all do what ultimately we want?
So Oliver assures Chloe, when she complains about the burden of the children. And who pays, he asks? Not you, but me. Yes, thinks Chloe in her heart, but your money is easily earned. I pay with my time and energy, my life itself. Children take the mother’s strength, grow strong as she grows weak.
Inigo and Imogen. Kevin, and Kestrel, and Stanhope. Poor Stanhope.
Today Chloe lunches with Marjorie. And afterwards, Chloe will go to visit Grace. Who would have thought, after all that happened, that they would ever consent again to enjoy each other’s company?
Today Esther Songford is dead. Five bungalows stand where once the roses grew, not to mention the onions and the cabbages. A builder has bought The Poplars. He uses it as a storeroom for his materials, and waits for it to fall down so he can have planning permission to build luxury flats on the site. The motorway is coming. The chalkpit has been filled in; where Mad Doll’s boys once struggled for their lives, and lost, the slip road runs.
Today Mr Songford lives in an Old People’s Home in Bournemouth. Grace seldom visits him.
Today Patrick’s canvases fetch from £750 (for the larger works) to £2,000 (for the tiniest). He paints women making love, giving birth, dying, dead, emerging dimly from an overwhelming wealth of domestic detail.
Chloe shows Patrick Bates her father’s paintings, those near miniatures in 1947. He comes to the room behind the Rose and Crown to inspect them, one night at ten-thirty, while Gwyneth is still washing-up glasses. Chloe lies on her front on the floor, searching beneath her mother’s bed, amongst the cases and crates, for the canvas roll. She finds them right at the back, pushed against the wall. By then she is almost completely under the bed, except for her seventeen-year-old legs.
The floor is so clean that Chloe’s check dress is not even made dusty. Had Gwyneth been of a more sluttish disposition, Chloe might have given up the search earlier, and Patrick never seen her father’s paintings, or Chloe’s smooth stretched legs, for that matter.
Thus our destinies are made, for good or ill. Inigo, Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel, Stanhope: linking back to brave David Evans, sitting exhausted in a hospital bed. waiting for the taste of blood in his mouth, covering his tiny canvases with scrupulous care—obsession mingling with optimism. Courage is not in vain; the painful wresting of beauty out of ugliness is not wasted. Believe it to be forgotten, worthless, buried deep and rotting under clods of earth, yet it creeps out somehow, raises its storms of life and energy.
Patrick stares at David Evans’ paintings and seems stunned.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Very interesting.’
He looks again.
‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘There’s one way not to die.’
Chloe is flushed from crawling about on the floor.
‘Would you like me to make you pregnant?’ Patrick inquires, and it seems to Chloe that this is exactly what she wants. Patrick makes love to her there and then, upon her mother’s bed, to Chloe’s infinite amazement and gratification. It seems to her not so much a pleasurable experience as an overwhelming one—as much another world to enter into, as the one of sleep, when she has been awake, or waking, when she has been asleep. She suspects it of being a dangerous world, full of deadly pit-traps, but clearly the one the elite inhabit.
Patrick leaves within the half-hour, to get back to camp.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says. ‘Forget all about it outside. Remember it inside. It’s very good for you.’
The next morning, waking, she has difficulty in believing the event actually occurred. She stares at the faint well-sponged stain on her mother’s coverlet, and wonders if perhaps she did spill her tea, as she told Gwyneth. Patrick, thereafter, ignores her, and suffering, she recognizes reality again.
She isn’t pregnant, not this time. She doesn’t care for that: it makes Patrick too unlike the Deity.
twenty-five
‘NO,’ SAYS CHLOE, ‘I don’t know what today is.’ Today Françoise has been in the Rudore household for just nine months. For three months she has had carnal acquaintance with her employer. Chloe has had none for nearly a year. Is this hardship? Chloe does not know.
When Chloe sleeps in her husband’s bed, there is no end to her expectations—not just that the empty spaces in her body should be nightly filled and rewarded, but all her inner space as well, by day.
Look after me, nurture me, love me, care for me, she cries to him with every waking and with every sleeping breath. Be perfect. Not perfect as you see it, but as I want perfection. Be perfect not just for me, but for our children too. All our children. Don’t work, don’t drink, don’t be bad-tempered; these things deflect you from your task. Your task is me. Fill me, fill my empty spaces. Complete me.
Although, in her heart, Chloe knows she never can be filled. Some wounds have gone too deep, protective membranes have been torn and can’t be mended. Love and concern will always trickle out of her, in the end, and leave her empty again, no matter how he fills, and fills.
But sleeping in his bed, she cannot quench her expectations.
Out of his bed, she can be serene. Badly treated, but at least free of expectation. Walking wounded, trudging away from the battle zone, not needing the pretence of being whole. What a relief ! So long as the children notice nothing.
Of course they notice. Inigo and Imogen, Kestrel and Kevin. Stanhope too.
‘Very well,’ says Chloe, ‘tell me what today is.’ The ground beneath shakes as a juggernaut passes, off on its journey to the M4 and the West.
What a dim domestic heroine she is in danger of becoming, like her mother, like Mrs Songford, who at least died in disgrace, like a million million women, shuffling and shameful to the end.
‘Today eighteen years ago,’ says Marjorie. ‘I went to the hospital to collect Ben and I found him dead in a drawer. Today a week ago I went to the doctor, and he said I ought to have a hysterectomy, it was ridiculous the way I bled, and I don’t know what to do. Don’
t you please tell me, either, Chloe, I don’t trust your judgement any more. Not since Françoise. You don’t know how that’s upset me. I had hoped that you at least could be happy.’
What can Chloe say? She wants to cry, for everyone.
twenty-six
TODAY GRACE LIVES WITH Sebastian, who is fifteen years younger than she is. Or rather Sebastian lives with Grace. Grace may have the income, but Sebastian has the talent, the charm, and the future. He picks and chooses whom he lives with. Grace, these days, tends to take what comes along. Sebastian is a film director, or would be if he could raise the money to make a film. He was taught film-making at his public school, and took a degree in visual communication at college.
Today Grace lives in a half-finished flat, on the top floor of a large terrace house in Holland Park. She has been living there for six months, the last three of them with Sebastian. Here Chloe goes to visit her.
Builders have been knocking three rooms into one, but have gone away, it seems, in the middle of the task. There are piles of plaster rubble and heaps of sodden wallpaper, inside and outside the flat, and strips of wallpaper are still stretched half-pasted on a trestle table. Tins of paint stand open and congealing. Chloe automatically replaces the lids.