Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

  Chloe What about Stanhope’s school fees?

  Grace Perhaps he’ll have to go to a comprehensive school, after all. That should please you. But it will be from necessity, not principle, don’t think otherwise.

  Chloe God give me strength.

  This is Oliver’s favourite phrase.

  Grace Don’t get so agitated. Stephen said it was a perfectly good script. He told me I should put my money in it. He said the world was ripe, for protest films.

  Chloe But Stephen is in advertising, not films.

  Stephen is Grace’s brother. He is twenty-seven.

  twenty-nine

  SPRING, 1945. HITLER IS in retreat. Esther Songford is fatter than ever, in spite of stringent rationing. Two ounces of butter a week, three of margarine, one egg and six ounces of meat. Bread and potatoes are on points, as are nearly all groceries. Only carrots and cabbage seem in infinite supply. Esther cooks both in the same water, to save fuel.

  ‘You lumber round like an old cow,’ says Edwin to Esther, and she cries. She would like to be young and lively and slim again, and not feel sick all the time. She would like to be like Helen, to please her husband. She doses herself with Syrup of Figs, in the hope that it will make her so. She has a vague belief that you become fat from eating hot food; and lets her dinner get cold upon her plate, to Grace’s outrage and irritation. Anything irritates Grace, these days.

  Edwin explains about proteins and carbohydrates: but Esther refuses to understand. She is not stupid, but is as irrational about food as she is about her insides.

  One Saturday evening when Marjorie is back for the weekend, she, Grace and Chloe sit playing Monopoly with Esther. Esther sits well back from the table to give her fat tummy room. She wears a thin green cotton smock over a skirt which will not meet around her waist, and is pinned with a nappy pin.

  A ripple runs under the smock. Esther’s bulging stomach, beneath the thin cotton, can be seen to bulge and heave. There’s something alive, inside.

  ‘Look,’ says Marjorie, her hand frozen in mid air, still holding the hotel she’s about to put down on Pall Mall. (Marjorie’s winning, as usual. Lucky in games, unlucky in love.) Everyone looks where she points.

  ‘There’s something in there moving,’ says Marjorie.

  Mrs Songford lurches to her feet: she is pale with shock and realization.

  ‘I’m too old,’ she says. ‘I can’t be. I thought it was the Change.’

  But it’s not, and she is, and Stephen is born in the cottage hospital some two months later.

  The end of the war is a difficult time for everyone. The adrenalin level in the nation’s bloodstream falls abruptly—depression is bound to follow. It does. Fear of oneself replaces the fear of sudden death: waking nightmares turn into sleeping ones again. No excuses left. Children have to move over to make room for fathers they cannot remember: wives have beloved husbands to feed and not just talk about: women have to leave their jobs and return to the domestic dedication expected of all good women in peacetime. Hitler is not coming, and neither is God; there is to be neither punishment nor salvation. There is, instead, a flurry of sexual activity which will land the schools between 1950 and 1960 with what is known as ‘The Bulge’.

  In the meantime, at home, there is a shortage of medical supplies—anaesthetics and blood for transfusions, not to mention doctors and nurses, are hard to come by. Midwifery, as always, comes low on the list of national priorities. Poor Esther, after a long labour unrelieved by anaesthetics, enjoined not to make a fuss by a severe spinster midwife, is delivered of a baby boy by sharp steel forceps. Esther haemorrhages after the baby has been put into the nursery, and everyone has gone off to tea, and dies unattended.

  An accident, an illness, a death—and a family unit which has seemed secure and permanent can be seen to crumble, with a kind of gratitude, into nothingness. It seems that chaos and dissolution are the norm, and the good times just an accident between them. Days which seem hesitant and troubled as they are lived through, full of minor irritations and absurdities, can be seen in retrospect to be days of wine and roses. Monopoly! Flower shows! School reports! Blackberry puddings and arguments about onions!

  They were good times at The Poplars, yes they were, and it was Esther who provided them, plodding dutifully through her days, though no-one thanked her at the time. Did she know she was rewarded? That for Marjorie, Grace and Chloe she provided a nourishment which was to see them through their bad times into good? Or did she see herself as her husband claimed to see her, a stumbling ineffectual creature, mentally chewing the cud of her days as once, at her father’s behest, she chewed each mouthful of food, over and over and over again?

  Grace is seventeen when the baby is born, and her mother dies. She is supposed to be going to the Slade in the autumn, to study the graphic arts. But what’s to be done with this motherless baby, this squalling red-faced morsel with its bruised temples and its sticky eyes? Will Grace stay home and look after it?

  No, Grace will not.

  Edwin, distraught enough at Esther’s death, finding his days empty, his socks unwashed, his food uncooked, his evenings at the pub flavourless for lack of her disapproval, takes refuge in rage and madness. He will not speak to Grace: she is, he says, unnatural and unwomanly. He refuses to pay for her tuition at the Slade; but Esther has left her daughter two hundred pounds he never knew she had, and this too he cannot forget or forgive. He is quite mad, for a time. Relatives say he must engage a housekeeper to look after the house and the baby, and by inference himself, but he will not. He will only be cheated and taken advantage of; he knows it. His pink face grows pale and wan: his paunch shrivels, for a time he looks as Esther does—dead.

  Weeds run riot over the flower-beds. See how nature plots against him? By the time he recovers his sanity he has sold The Poplars, bought himself a bungalow in Bournemouth, sent the baby off to be brought up by Esther’s elder brother’s wife—an amiable widow, by name Elaine, who wears a shirt, tweed suit and brogues, and lives in harmony with Olive, a lady companion with a definite black moustache.

  Elaine and Olive breed dogs outside Horsham; and here, except when swept off his feet by bouncing and clumsy labradors, Stephen is reared in happiness and contentment.

  He grows, in fact, to some twenty stone, which in a young man of twenty-seven and five feet ten is not inconsiderable. He has Esther’s pale pop eyes, much magnified by heavy spectacles, reddish hair and a cleft chin. He has an astute mind, and a commercial instinct. He works in advertising.

  Grace used to be ashamed of Stephen. Stephen was, after all, associated with a traumatic time in her life, and could almost be said by his untimely birth to have caused many of her troubles. Stephen was fat, plain and not at all smart. Latterly, though, the gloss of advertising and the cheerful energy of the commercial world, rubbing off upon and somehow firming up his pallid skin, have made Stephen seem rather more attractive to Grace. She looks towards him with hope, beginning to see him as an asset, and not a liability.

  Grace Of course, you realize that Stephen is Patrick’s son?

  Shock affects Chloe with a slight buzzing in the ears, a distancing of sound, a difficulty in hearing.

  Grace It gives one some hope for Stanhope, to think that he’s Stephen’s half-brother. Perhaps we should steer Stanhope towards advertising? Or would Oliver object?

  Chloe I do not believe that Stephen is Patrick’s son. I cannot believe it. Your mother wasn’t like that. Women didn’t behave like that.

  Grace All women are like that. All women behave like that. It’s been proved, at last. They’ve just done a blood-grouping survey in a Hampshire Town, and discovered that a minimum of one in four children cannot possibly be the blood child of the alleged father. A minimum!

  Chloe All I’d deduce from that is an inefficient local maternity home which doles out the wrong babies. Patrick was a boy at the time. Esther was old enough to be his mother.

  Grace So am I old enough to be Sebastian’s mother. Pe
rhaps it runs in families. Stephen looks like Patrick, don’t you think?

  Chloe Beneath so much fat, who could tell?

  Grace And he has this extraordinary creativity. He’s always making or doing something, just like Patrick.

  And indeed Patrick, as a young man, is possessed by a demon creativity. He must make something where nothing was before—a painting, a sing-song, a novel, a garden, an affair—forever bridging the gap between nothing and something.

  Grace And he knows everything too, just like Patrick did.

  In 1945, it is astonishing what Patrick knows, which the rest of Ulden doesn’t. He knows that the Bank of England financed Hitler, and that Churchill is an incompetent paranoiac: he knows that sex is not sin, and that gramophone records don’t have to be small and fast, but could be large and slow, or even put on to lengths of tape, if only vested interests would allow. He knows that one day men will get to the moon, and that after the war to be born British will not be to be especially blessed by God. He knows what is happening to the Jews in Germany. He knows what will make Marjorie, Grace and Chloe happy.

  For reasons, then obscure, he prefers to keep Marjorie unhappy.

  Waltzing with Marjorie once, at the D-Day dance, he points out to her some six or seven of the most good-looking young men on the floor.

  ‘Him and him and him,’ he says. ‘They’re all in treatment for VD.’

  Grace Anyway, you know what Patrick was. Anything in skirts would do. And mother had very nice legs, and you know how she was always bending over the flower-beds. Shall I take the blue bikini or the black one-piece?

  Grace’s body is still lean and smooth. She bronzes beautifully.

  Chloe The one-piece.

  But Grace has already sniffed it and tossed it into the waste bin.

  Chloe Grace, you have to stop saying things that aren’t true. I would have thought your life was difficult enough without you stirring things up.

  Grace just looks at Chloe and smiles. And Chloe remembers Esther Songford, young and vulnerable, crying in the kitchen, and wonders. And Chloe considers Grace’s past and present, and wonders. Perhaps Edwin Songford, the father, the ultimate provider, did once in fact ultimately provide what was required, in fleshly terms, failing all other. And perhaps Grace’s lie—for lie she claims it was—is not the incest itself, but her horror of it.

  Grace Sometimes you act like Mad Doll, Chloe. You won’t believe what you know to be true.

  thirty

  MAD DOLL HAUNTS ULDEN through the war years. She comes up on the London train at weekends, and walks through the village, stopping passers-by, knocking at doors, always smiling, always wheedling.

  ‘Have you seen my boys, doll? Cyril and Ernest?’

  She offers wild flowers to the women and kisses to the men, as if she thought she could bribe good news out of them.

  ‘Cyril’s jersey is green, dolly. I knitted it myself. Ernest’s is maroon and on the small side.’

  When it grew dark she’d give up and go home, sitting in the train quite calm and collected, like anyone else.

  Cyril and Ernest are buried in Ulden churchyard. They were drowned on their second day in the village, running back to home and London in the middle of the night, crossing the ice of the chalk pit in the dark. Their school had been evacuated to Ulden. without warning to the parents; and no information either, once they’d gone, in case German spies found out. Mad Doll, they say, has slept with the school-keeper to find out where her children have gone, and even then he couldn’t be precise. Essex, was all he’d say, and Essex is a large place.

  Mad Doll arrives in Ulden the day after her children are buried. The vicar breaks the news of their deaths to her, but she seems unable to take it in. He leads her by the hand to the new grave, but she looks at it blankly and then says ‘I’ll give you a kiss if you tell me where they are. More than a kiss, if you insist.’

  No wonder he suffers from blood-pressure.

  She’s a pretty girl, still only in her mid-twenties, though soon she develops a crabbed and aged look. Her husband is on active service, somewhere secret, and he is never to come back. He is posted missing, presumed dead. The manner of his death is kept secret too. She’s become so used to secrets, poor soul, she’s simply ceased to trust information.

  thirty-one

  SEBASTIAN COMES BOUNDING up the stairs, lean, lively, and desperate, as if the hounds of old age would be yapping at his heels if he went more slowly. He seems pleased to see Chloe, to Grace’s surprise. He clasps Chloe’s stiff, self-conscious body to his thin, denim shirt, asks how she is, even asks after Marjorie.

  ‘Having a hysterectomy,’ says Chloe.

  ‘My God, in the hysterectomy belt already!’ says Sebastian.

  Sebastian wears a wide belt with a brass buckle, in the form of a snake swallowing an eagle. How he mocks and masters the world! How he suffers and shrinks at the prospect of boredom and solitude. How untouched he is by the world’s miseries.

  All Sebastian owes the world, Sebastian believes, is his own existence, and the pleasure he takes in it.

  Sebastian’s buttocks are clearly defined in faded jeans. Chloe surprises herself with a sudden surge of sexual desire, which goes straight from eyes to womb, bypassing her brain. Is this, she wonders, what Esther Songford saw and felt, lifting her eyes from the geraniums to those of Patrick Bates?

  Forget it outside, remember it inside. It will do you good.

  ‘Marjorie’s insides were always a source of trouble to her,’ says Grace, ushering Chloe out rather hastily. ‘She’d be better off without them.’

  Well, thinks Chloe, forgiving, if your mother died in childbirth, giving birth to the half-brother of one of your own children, you too might find yourself viewing female insides as more trouble than they’re worth.

  ‘Grace,’ says Chloe, lingering and anxious, ‘your mother didn’t know about you and Patrick, did she?’

  ‘No,’ says Grace. ‘But I think she knew about father and me. That must have helped her die happy. She was always putting me in his way, you must have noticed, drawing attention to my tits or my arse, under guise of clothing coupons.’

  ‘You imagine it.’ Chloe is nervous.

  ‘She didn’t like me and she didn’t like him, and it killed two birds with one stone. Like you and your Françoise.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Pushing her under your husband’s nose. I watched you do it, and I think you deserve what happened.’

  She is all malevolence, suddenly, eyes aglitter. Chloe trembles, as she does when her reasonable world turns upside down.

  ‘What harm have I done you?’ she asks. ‘Why are you like this?’

  ‘You just existed,’ says Grace. ‘You and Marjorie. Great big cuckoos in my nest. It was you who killed my mother. You wore her out.’

  And Grace goes inside and slams the door and poor Chloe, much upset, goes back home to Egden, to cope with Françoise and weed the geranium beds, before the light fades.

  thirty-two

  MARJORIE, GRACE AND ME.

  We have our arcane secrets, our superstitions, our beliefs, fact and fantasy mixed. Our sexual fears, both rational and irrational. Our own experiences which we share with each other. They are altogether different from what the novels and text books told us they would be.

  We got our certificates, our diplomas, our degrees. We had miscarriages, abortions and babies. Marjorie and I caught the clap. We still cannot name our secret parts. We know them blindly, by feel, and not by sight or name. They rule us.

  Grace says women ovulate from sheer astonishment. That’s why innocent girls get pregnant and experienced ones don’t. Grace says she has a corroded cervix: she believes she has a soft and bubbly cyst somewhere inside which no doctor can discover: she says she’s only twice had an orgasm in her life other than by masturbation, which she didn’t discover until long after she’d left Christie, and even then didn’t know that what she did had a name or that anyone else ever did
it. Grace feels her bosom daily for cancer and daily discovers a good many different lumps. Grace does not trust the doctors who examine her insides. She suspects they take pleasure from the process. Well, she does.

  Grace has had cheap back-street abortions and National Health abortions and an expensive post-Abortion Act abortions. She loves anaesthetics and feels only relief when the baby’s gone and she’s no longer nauseous. Grace tried a contraceptive coil but bled too profusely to keep it in. One woman in three does, says Grace. The pill made her sick. Dutch caps disgust her. These days Grace takes no contraceptive precautions at all. It is her Act of Oneness with the universe, or so she says. She relies on her age, her inverted womb and her imagined fibroids to protect her from pregnancy.

  Grace enjoys getting pregnant, but not being pregnant.

  Marjorie believes her reproductive energies were drained by her first baby, which she failed to carry to maturity.

  Marjorie believes she is infertile, and will never know, because she takes oestrogen pills to regulate her monthly bleeding—not that it does.

  Marjorie believes the age of the menarche to be dependent on the weight of the girl. Menstruation starts at ninety-four pounds. She, later to menstruate than any of her friends, need never have worried.

  Marjorie believes it is just as well she is infertile—since any baby she had would be born monstrous. A disagreeable young nurse implied as much at the VD clinic she had the misfortune to attend, and Marjorie chooses to believe her.

  Marjorie thinks if she had Patrick’s baby it would perhaps be all right, but Patrick, alas, only uses her as a washer-woman.

  Marjorie consults gynaecologists, goes to Health Farms, looks to authorities to tell her about the state of her insides, which she sees as a bloody, indeterminate mass and which behave accordingly.