Female Friends

by Fay Weldon

Marjorie You know how every penny counted, in those days. It was send the telegram, or buy the butter. I hated margarine. Everyone called me Marge at school, especially you, Chloe.

  Chloe I’m sorry.

  So she had. Her own name, Chloe, rare and strange, had elevated her from common status. To call Marjorie Marge was to demote her, and when she could, she did.

  Marjorie Too late now, I just thought I’d mention it. Anyway it wasn’t that. I wanted father for myself. I thought mother would be bad for him. And he died.

  Chloe Marjorie, have you told Helen’s friends that she’s in hospital?

  Marjorie (Ignoring her) And the other thing, the Frognal house. I should never have stayed there. Patrick was right, it was me haunting myself, sending myself messages. Get out, forget it, forget everything, start again. Stop trying to wring blood out of stones. My blood, staining those stairs. How strange it all is. I should have been glad when mother changed the locks and kept me out, but I wasn’t.

  A house, thinks Chloe, a home. If I only had somewhere to go, would I take the children, leave Oliver? No.

  Chloe (Persistent) Marjorie, who else have you told about Helen being here?

  Marjorie No-one. Just you and Grace.

  Chloe opens Helen’s crocodile handbag, which stands on the bedside locker, and searches it for an address book. What sacrilege! Rifling mother’s handbag. Will Chloe grieve for Helen when she is dead; and if then, why not now? Or will it be pity for herself she feels; another’s death, by implication, being her own. We must live in the expectation of death, Chloe thinks, for ourselves and others. Only in the light of our ending, do our lives make any kind of sense. Helen’s handbag is neat and clean. A little vanity case; powder-case and rouge. A lace handkerchief, amazingly white. A note-case, decently filled. A suede purse, unscuffed and unstained. A sachet of eau-de-Cologne. A dentist’s card. The address book, with a tiny pencil tucked down the spine, and the pages neatly filled with tiny writing. An old lady’s handbag, but full of expectation. Marjorie accepts the address book.

  Chloe Marjorie, when I was sleeping just now, did I snore?

  Marjorie What a funny thing to ask. No, of course you didn’t.

  Chloe It’s the kind of thing one never knows.

  Marjorie leaves the room in search of a telephone. Chloe is left alone with Helen, and is afraid. And indeed, as if relieved of the weight of Marjorie’s presence, Helen’s eyelids flutter, and lift, and Helen stares full at Chloe. She speaks, in a lilting fashion, in the manner of some thirty years ago.

  Helen I wish you’d do something about your hair, Marjorie. Why can’t you be more like Chloe Evans? She’s always so neat.

  Her eyelids fall again. She sighs, exhausted. Two nurses, one black, one white, both tired, come in with a trolley and set about transferring Helen from her comfortable bed on to its uncomfortable surface.

  Chloe Where are you taking her?

  Nurse Are you the next-of-kin?

  Chloe No.

  Nurse Well, I don’t suppose it matters. Just down to X-ray.

  Helen’s bed is empty when Marjorie returns. She brings Grace with her. Grace has been visiting Patrick. She wears faded blue jeans, a navy shirt and a denim jacket. Her eyes are still puffy from the outbursts of the morning, and her face seems lax and flushed. She is growing old, thinks Chloe. But Grace sits on the edge of the bed and swings her legs like a girl, and is undaunted.

  Grace I’m sure it’s all right, Marjorie. They wouldn’t be X-raying her if they thought she was going to pop off any moment. Patrick says people live for years with brain tumours. He says he thinks perhaps he has one himself. I wouldn’t be surprised. What an excuse for bad behaviour! Please sir, it’s the tumour. He’s looking dreadful. I’m sure he’s got scurvy. He’s living off kippers and tea and has at least six chains on the door to keep out robbers. You should see the ulcers on his gums. He wants his washing back, Marjorie, clean or dirty. He doesn’t trust you.

  Marjorie I have other things to think about.

  Grace I only told you to amuse you. I nearly brought him with me. You know how he loves hospitals.

  Marjorie Yes, well he never loved mother.

  Grace I suppose not. Why are you looking so glum, Chloe? Do you want me to go away?

  Chloe No. I wish you’d be more responsible about Stanhope, that’s all.

  Grace Truth is truth, you’re always saying so. Actually, I have to agree with you. Patrick isn’t much cop as a father. I’d forgotten. His legs are in a dreadful state. His varicose veins have ulcerated. He’s drinking much too much, but at least it should lower his sperm count. Anyway I hope so. Tell Stanhope I made a mistake, or something. I’d got my months muddled up. Set him free to marry Kestrel.

  Chloe Why should he want to do that?

  Grace Well, you know what life is like. It’s the kind of thing that happens.

  Chloe You don’t want Stanhope to live with you?

  Grace Good God, no. I’m not fit. You’re always saying so. Anyway Sebastian’s on his way home. The beach was awash, he says. I wish he’d rung this morning, before I’d seen Patrick. Marjorie, Patrick says if the Frognal house is ever unlocked, can he move back in?

  Marjorie No.

  Grace He’s angry because you haven’t returned his washing. He thinks you’ve stolen it. He can’t go on living down there. He needs some help.

  Marjorie He won’t get it from me, any more. Life’s too short.

  Grace Why not? He’s been in such a state since Midge died.

  Chloe Good.

  Grace You think you’re a saint, Chloe, but really you’re a devil. If anyone’s to blame for Midge dying, it’s you.

  Chloe Me?

  Grace Yes. If you hadn’t said you’d look after the children, Midge couldn’t have done it. She’d be alive and grizzling today. You’re a very dangerous person, Chloe. People who stand about waiting for other people to fall to bits so they can pick up the pieces ought to be locked up. They encourage disintegration. It’s time you learned to enjoy yourself, Chloe; you’re too dangerous as a martyr.

  Do what you want, not what you ought. Isn’t that what Chloe once shouted at poor Gwyneth? What progress can there be, from generation to generation, if daughters do as mothers do? Will Imogen anguish over Chloe, as Chloe does over her own mama? To understand, forgive, endure. What kind of lesson is that for daughters? Better to end like Helen, unforgiving and unforgiven. Better to live like Grace, at least alive.

  A nurse, pale and shaken, comes to summon the next-of-kin, identified after some confusion as Marjorie, not Grace, to the social worker’s office. Chloe barely notices. She, Midge’s destruction, not her salvation?

  Grace Mind you, I’m only the girl who got sent to her room for hoping that Hitler would win the war. Anything for a change. I have at least kept my energy, by caring about nothing, or not for longer than a couple of hours. Morality is very devitalizing, Chloe. Look what you’ve done to Oliver, by being so much better than him. He hasn’t done a decent day’s work since you married him.

  Marjorie comes back from the social worker’s office, ashen. She smooths the pillows of Helen’s bed and replaces the counterpane tidily. Helen is dead. Her heart stopped on the trolley on the way to the X-ray department, and whether motivated by kindness or enervated by exhaustion, no-one ran for the resuscitation equipment. They walked instead, and by the time help came it was too late.

  ‘They should never have moved her,’ says Marjorie. ‘You should have stopped them, Chloe. Poor little mother.’

  Marjorie cries, for herself.

  sixty-one

  CHLOE SITS WITH MARJORIE and Grace at the bus shelter outside the hospital. It is raining. There are no taxis. No bus appears. Chloe’s blue suede shoes are wet, and darker blue around the sole. Her feet are cold. She shivers. They are silent for a time. Grace is feeling the top of her head.

  ‘I’m sure I’m pregnant again,’ says Grace presently. ‘I have that funny feeling. And the top of my head is tender whe
n I press. Remember when we saw the baby moving in mother’s tummy? Wasn’t it dreadful? I wish it had been a girl. A girl wouldn’t have killed her. I’m better with girls, anyway. I wasn’t really interested in Piers, actually, only Petra.’

  ‘It will be a boy,’ says Chloe, ‘if it’s anything. You’re wanting too hard.’

  But she doesn’t doubt that Grace is pregnant. Marjorie holds her mother’s handbag in her lap.

  ‘What shall I do with it?’ she asks. ‘I can’t bear to go through it.’

  ‘Leave it in the waste bin,’ says Chloe.

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yes. Someone who needs it will find it.’ Marjorie puts the handbag in the waste bin. Later, remarkably, someone honest finds it, takes it to the police station, and Marjorie is traced and asked to collect it, and does, and grieves afresh, and blames Chloe, but at the time the gesture holds good.

  ‘That’s that, really,’ says Marjorie. ‘I wish a bus would come. I’m cold. What a dreadful country this is. There’s nothing to keep me here, now, is there.’

  ‘If you only believed in the transmigration of souls,’ says Grace, ‘as I try very hard to do, you wouldn’t feel so dismal. Helen was at her best in a beautiful body. If I’m pregnant, I daresay her soul will enter the baby. That’s what it was all about.’

  ‘God help us all,’ says Chloe.

  ‘She didn’t say anything before she died?’ asks Marjorie. ‘I should never have listened to you, Chloe. I should never have left her.’

  ‘She stayed asleep,’ says Chloe. Is she right to lie, or wrong? She will never know.

  ‘If you want the Frognal house,’ says Marjorie, ‘you can have it.’

  ‘What for?’ asks Chloe, surprised.

  ‘To live in without Oliver,’ says Marjorie. ‘With the children but without Oliver. You can let off the top and live off the proceeds.’

  ‘She’ll never do it,’ says Grace. ‘Give it to Patrick instead.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ says Marjorie.

  A bus arrives. They board it, and sit in a row on the seat next to the door. Marjorie and Grace get off at Earls Court. Chloe goes through to Piccadilly Circus and changes on to a 13 for Liverpool Street. She lies awake most of the night. Neither Oliver nor Françoise disturbs her. Everyone, that night, sleeps in his own bed.

  Who’d have thought it?

  sixty-two

  MARJORIE, GRACE AND ME. What can we tell you to help you, we three sisters, walking wounded that we are? What can we tell you of living and dying, beginning and ending, patching and throwing away; of the patterns that our lives make, which seem to have some kind of order, if only we could perceive it more clearly.

  We have only our own small patch of experience to relate, we three. If there are lessons to be learned by others, I would be glad, but also surprised. For who bothers to learn by another’s experience? When the booby-trap is sprung, who lives to tell? We all know that.

  Female bodies lie strewn across the battle-field, of course they do, gaunt dead arms upflung towards the sky. It was an exhilarating battle, don’t think it wasn’t. The sun shone brightly at the height of it, armour glinted, sparks flew. And the earth receives its blood with gratitude. The seasons are renewed again.

  Pretty little sister, on your feather cushion, combing out your silken hair, don’t discredit what your elder sister says. Much less your grandmama. Listen carefully now to what she says, and you may not end as tired and worn and sad as she. Be grateful for the softness of the cushion, while it’s there, and hope that she who stuffed and sewed it does not grudge its pleasure to you. The sewing of it brought her a great deal of pain and very little reward. But for her, and you, and all of us, says grandmama, it is much the same. The good times come, and no sooner here than gone. And as they go, they come again.

  So treasure your moments of beauty, your glimpses of truth, your nights of love. They are all you have.

  Take family snaps, unashamed. Dress up for weddings, all weddings. Rejoice at births, all births. For days can be happy—whole futures cannot. This is what grandmama says. This moment now is all you have. These days, these nights, these moments one by one.

  As for my friends, my female friends. Grace does a soft-shoe shuffle amongst the bodies of the fallen, and keeps the vultures off a little while. She has her baby, keeps it, calls it Hypatia to annoy, lives with Patrick for a little, goes back to Sebastian, whom she presently declares, rightly or wrongly, to be Hypatia’s father. Sebastian gives up the film industry and goes into advertising, under the patronage of Esther’s son Stephen, who, being now responsible for a slimming food account, presently loses some five stone. As Grace remarks, improvement in the human condition is always possible. She herself is a good mother to baby Hypatia, quite a lot of the time, and in her domestic life with Sebastian recaptures a little of the languid chocolate-box flavour of her earlier life with Christie. Stanhope visits once a month. She makes him cucumber sandwiches, and otherwise leaves him alone. And once a week she goes to Bournemouth to visit her old father, and keep the tomatoes in his window boxes watered.

  Who’d have thought it?

  Hypatia, fortunately, is a patient and obliging baby, who never cries if she can help it, and is not in the least like Helen, but more like Chloe’s former self.

  Marjorie, patched up, removes herself from the conflict altogether, and finds another, healthier battle-field in Israel. ‘I was my father’s child and not my mother’s,’ she says. She and her camera crew court death daily up and down the cease-fire zone, waiting for violation incidents. Without her womb and without her mother, she seems cheerful enough. She is brown, weather-beaten, and handsome at last, in a country where to be devoid of juices is not remarkable, and to be alive, male or female, is commendable.

  As for me, Chloe, I no longer wait to die. I put my house, Marjorie’s house, in order, and not before time. The children help. Oliver says, ‘But you can’t leave me with Françoise,’ and I reply, I can, I can, and I do.

  About the Author

  Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

  Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1974 by Fay Weldon

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  “The Ballad of the German Soldier’s Bride” by Bertolt Brecht is repri
nted by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main

  978-1-4804-1235-4

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY FAY WELDON

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia