Down Among the Women Read online

  ‘No one who married a man like you,’ she says, with glee, ‘is any daughter of mine.’

  ‘I shall get Byzantia away from you,’ says Edwin. ‘You’re none of you fit to have a child in your care. You’ll be hearing from my solicitors.’ And he slams the phone down.

  Presently Wanda looks out Scarlet’s old telephone book, traces some of her friends, and telephones round. But no one has seen or heard of Scarlet.

  Edwin rings again. He is crying. He apologizes for being rude. He wants Scarlet and Byzantia back. He loves them. The house is silent and empty without them. If he has behaved badly he is sorry. He will go down on his knees if anyone wants him to. He pleads with Wanda to allow him to speak to Scarlet. It is a long time before she can convince him that Scarlet is not with her.

  ‘Then where is she? You’re her mother. Where else would she go?’

  ‘Perhaps she has a lover,’ suggests Wanda.

  ‘Who?’ he is very sharp.

  ‘Now how should I know? You haven’t let her speak to me lately; if I can’t give you any information you have only yourself to blame,’ says Wanda unkindly.

  ‘So long as it’s no one local,’ he says. And then, with real feeling, ‘Supposing she’s in some trouble? I only ever wanted to look after her and little Rosemary.’

  ‘Little who?’ asks Wanda.

  ‘I used to call her Rosemary. I never liked Byzantia as a name.’

  Wanda’s heart, which had been softening towards Edwin, hardens again.

  ‘If I hear from her I’ll let you know,’ she says, ‘and in the meantime please stop pestering me with phone calls. You bore the piss out of me, if you want to know.’

  There is a short silence. Then Edwin says, coolly. ‘I shall have to report certain things to the Education Authority, you know.’

  ‘Report away,’ she says, ‘report away!’ and puts the phone down.

  ‘Poor bloody sod,’ she says to her lorry-driver. ‘I suppose Scarlet drove him mad. He was eccentric when she married him. Now he’s fucking mad.’

  But she telephones Kim, all the same, to tell him his daughter is missing and ask him what he means to do about it. Kim, as usual, is not in, so she speaks to Susan. Susan, lately, has been in the habit of visiting Wanda, although Wanda does not know why. Susan on a visit tends just to sit around, and smile in a vague and worried way. She talks very little, except about Simeon’s education—he goes to a school for young gentlemen behind Harrods and wears a curious cloth cap which rests on his infant ears and all but covers his dull eyes. Simeon is very clean and well-behaved, and Susan is proud of him.

  Now Susan, hearing the news, begins to cry. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she says, ‘I shouldn’t have told her I was seeing you. Now she’s out and she’ll murder me.’

  ‘She hasn’t been in prison,’ says Wanda. ‘Merely resting. Now Byzantia’s five, life can start for her again.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the child,’ sobs Susan. ‘It was what I said to her. I should never have interfered. Now what’s going to happen?’

  What happens is that the next day Scarlet turns up, her hair blonde and permed, at Wanda’s flat and asks if she can leave Byzantia with her mother for an hour or two.

  ‘Off whoring?’ asks Wanda. ‘Already?’

  To which Scarlet retaliates by turning to the lorry-driver and saying, ‘If it’s a mother you’re after you’ve come to the wrong address.’

  (‘I don’t know what happens to everyone,’ Scarlet says to Jocelyn later. ‘The older we get the more we become ourselves. We were nicer when we were younger and all little bits of other people.’)

  Wanda sends the young man out to get fish and chips and enquires where Scarlet is living. Scarlet replies, haughtily enough, that she imagines that this is a matter of indifference to everyone, especially to her mother.

  ‘Not to your loony husband,’ says Wanda. ‘He wants you back.’

  ‘Which is more than you do,’ says Scarlet. ‘Don’t worry. I shan’t be a burden to you.’ And she snivels. She does not like to see her mother in the company of this young man.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake grow up,’ says Wanda. ‘You’re a grown woman, not a little girl. If you don’t want to tell me where you’re living, don’t. Only don’t use me as a dumping ground for Byzantia while you go off to parties.’

  ‘You can’t stand it, can you,’ says Scarlet. ‘You can’t stand me having a good time. You and Edwin ought just to have got married and left me out of it.’

  Byzantia stops staring at the television (a twelve-inch screen these days) and begins to grizzle. She is very tired, having spent the previous night in a strange boarding-house, the morning in a hair-dressing salon and the afternoon in a domestic agency. Wanda scoops her up in her arms. Byzantia likes her grandmother, and is instantly happy. She smiles benignly and falls asleep. She has lost her infant plumpness; she is now long-legged and wide-eyed.

  ‘Well,’ says Wanda, giving in. ‘Here we all are again, then.’ She feels, surprisingly, happier than she has for years.

  ‘Except you’ve got that awful boyfriend,’ says Scarlet, ‘and it’s revolting at your age.’

  Having got that out, she too feels better. She tells her mother she has taken a job as a living-in maid, in a household where they will take Byzantia too.

  Wanda clasps Byzantia and glares at Scarlet. ‘Over my dead body,’ she says.

  ‘But it’s all arranged,’ says Scarlet. ‘Anyway since when were you such a snob? I’m sure Byzantia doesn’t mind being the maidservant’s child.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ says Wanda flatly. ‘We’ll have to get you treatment.’

  Wanda rings Edwin and tells him Scarlet has turned up.

  ‘She is of course mad,’ she says to him.

  ‘I had been thinking just that,’ says Edwin. ‘I have been sitting here in this lonely house thinking just that. I took her out of the gutter and showed her every kindness. She has behaved wickedly; she has deprived Annabel of a settled home, and a status in life; she has ruined my happiness completely, and for what? Because she is sexually insatiable. It is a kindness to believe that she is mad.’

  ‘Quite so,’ says Wanda.

  ‘How thankless as a serpent’s tooth,’ he says, ‘to have so sharp a child.’

  ‘Quite so,’ says Wanda. ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘I don’t drink,’ he says. ‘It prevents me thinking carefully. I have a terrible, terrible pain. I am in agony and even little Pussy (his name for the big Alsatian dog next door) is missing her footsteps in the house. You are quite right. She is mad. I shall come straight over and explain that she is mad.’

  ‘I shouldn’t do that,’ says Wanda. ‘But what about getting her cured?’

  ‘Committing her, you mean?’ he asks, with a not unwelcome vision of a screaming Scarlet being carried off in a strait-jacket by white-coated orderlies.

  Wanda suggests that Edwin pays his runaway wife ten pounds a week, on condition that she is under psychiatric care. ‘It would be a very kind thing to do,’ she says, and rather to her astonishment, and certainly to Scarlet’s, who has already cast poor suffering Edwin in the villain’s role, he agrees. He says it is for Annabel’s sake, and so it is.

  ‘Just when I’d decided on a good name for her too,’ he laments, the next time he comes to deliver the money. He brings it in cash, in an envelope marked ‘Scarlet and Annabel’ every Friday evening at 6.30. He brings, in fact, £9. 17s. 6d., for he is claiming repayment in easy stages, of the £7 she stole from him. Every Friday Wanda must delay going to the pub in order to receive the money. Every week he asks if Scarlet is nearly cured, for he is certain that when she is, she will want to come back to him. How could she not?

  ‘He is a nice man, really,’ says Wanda to Scarlet. ‘Or if not nice, good.’

  ‘Yes, he is a good man,’ agrees Scarlet puzzled. ‘How can anyone be so good and yet so awful?’

  ‘It must be terrible for him to be without Byzantia,’ says Wand
a.

  ‘You mean Annabel,’ says Scarlet, but with rather less conviction.

  ‘Oh yes, Annabel,’ says Wanda, remembering. ‘It wouldn’t really do, would it? The most important thing in the world is to be oneself.’

  ‘Quite,’ says Scarlet.

  Scarlet and Byzantia live in a tiny flat round the corner from Wanda. They are glad to be on good terms with each other again. Wanda drinks rather less. The next time her lorry driver, angered by her foul tongue and her evil temper, hits her, she asks him to leave and he does.

  She stares at her face in the mirror and says, ‘I’m nearly fifty. I reckon that’s really that. With my build and on my form.’

  ‘Ha bleeding ha,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘I never thought I’d get that last gentleman,’ says Wanda. ‘What did he see in me? I make a lousy mother.’

  ‘I know,’ says Scarlet. ‘I wish you weren’t so proud of it.’

  ‘I wish,’ says Wanda, ‘if we’re talking of wishing, I had led a different life. I should never have left your father.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Scarlet indulgently, ‘I can’t see you being happy with fitted carpets and six matching dining-room chairs. Not as an ad-man’s wife.’

  ‘If he’d stayed with me,’ says Wanda, ‘he wouldn’t be the way he is now. He’s done the whole thing to demonstrate just how much he needs me.’

  ‘But he put you in prison.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have slashed his paintings.’ Scarlet has never before heard Wanda express regret for something she has done. ‘It was a terrible thing to do. He was very young. So was I. We both were. He thought I was trying to destroy him, but honestly, truthfully, I wasn’t. Only his paintings.’

  ‘If you’d stayed,’ says Scarlet, ‘he wouldn’t have married Susan, and that would be wishing that infant creep Simeon out of existence.’

  ‘He hardly exists now,’ says Wanda unkindly. ‘I expect that’s why. Somewhere along the line something went wrong. I don’t believe Simeon was meant.’

  ‘You’re going to end up an R.C. convert,’ says Scarlet, ‘the way you talk these days.’

  ‘It’s old age,’ says Wanda. ‘I’m mellowing. I am finished with sex and see wheels within wheels. But I could wish things had been different.’

  ‘Well,’ says Scarlet, ‘all one can do is act according to one’s nature. It’s not a question of blame or praise.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ says Wanda. ‘Don’t be so sloppy. That’s your whole trouble. You behave as if you were some kind of stupid puppet and fate is pulling the strings. You should cut them loose and dance round a bit of your own accord. That’s another thing, I would have liked more children.’

  ‘What?’ says Scarlet, unbelieving. ‘More like me?’

  ‘You’re not so bad,’ says Wanda, and means it. Scarlet is pleased, and that evening cuts her hair very short, getting rid of the frizz. She looks boyish, now, and her spots have gone. She becomes quite thin and lively.

  All kinds of things please Scarlet now; from spring blossom to Byzantia rushing off to the local school by herself. Scarlet goes to see a psychiatrist once a week. She tells him what she thinks he would be interested to hear. She is waiting for a vacancy with a National Health psycho-analyst, which the psychiatrist, rather to her surprise, has recommended. She does not believe she needs treatment, but feels she owes at least this much to Edwin.

  She goes out with Edwin in the car on Sundays. She sits in the front, Byzantia in the back. Edwin picks them up at two, and they drive round the outskirts of London, while he catalogues railway bridges—his latest hobby—until five-thirty.

  Now his life has fallen into ritual again he seems quite happy, or at any rate not unhappy. He worries about Byzantia’s school, however.

  ‘I know it’s very modern,’ he says, ‘but it’s not for Annabel.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right,’ says Scarlet, ‘because her name’s not Annabel, it’s Byzantia.’

  ‘That’s what it says on her birth certificate, I know,’ he says, ‘but what sort of birth certificate is it? Certainly not one to be proud of.’

  ‘If you don’t call her Byzantia,’ says Scarlet, ‘I will never come out with you again on these boring and ridiculous rides.’

  ‘I never knew you minded,’ he says. ‘I thought it was rather jolly calling her different names. It was like having my own child. You are much younger than me, so I tried to be jolly. But if it pleases you I shall call her Byzantia. When you’re better and we live together again, we’ll discuss the matter once more. In the meantime, I don’t think the school is right for Byzantia.’

  ‘It’s very free,’ she says, ‘that’s what I like. And Byzantia can’t get there soon enough. She runs all the way, and sometimes I have to run after her with her shoes.’

  ‘She can’t read yet,’ he says. ‘She’ll be behind when the eleven plus time comes.’

  ‘I don’t care about exams,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s very modern of you, and I know it’s the latest theory, and I’m sure it’s the way your mother thinks, but take my word for it, a small child is best sitting at a desk learning, not crawling about on the floor playing with sand and water. As for these rides of ours being ridiculous and boring, you are quite wrong. You would find them very interesting if you would bring yourself to concentrate on patterns of building and subtleties of Victorian brickwork; and besides, it keeps us all in touch with one another, until this tragic patch of our lives is over.’

  ‘Yes, Edwin,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘All the same,’ says Edwin, ‘we could go further afield, I suppose. We could go visiting country houses. That would be very educational for Byzantia. I could pick you up at ten in the morning.’

  ‘No,’ says Scarlet. ‘Really, it’s all right.’ And adds brightly, ‘Our Victorian grandfathers had some wonderful bridge-builders, didn’t they.’

  ‘I have reason to believe,’ confides Edwin, reassured by her interest, ‘that a remote ancestor of mine designed Tower Bridge.’

  In the back Byzantia yawns.

  Jocelyn disapproves of Scarlet leaving Edwin.

  ‘You undertook something when you married him,’ she says. ‘Marriage is a serious matter.’

  Jocelyn is having a civilized afternoon affair with a young man. It is known in her circles as ‘having tea at the Ritz’, and though it hardly counts as infidelity, it has both increased Jocelyn’s reverence for the institution of marriage, and her irritation with her husband. She is made angry and anxious at the thought that marriages can and do break up.

  She suspects that Philip may be having an affair with his secretary; her only evidence is her consciousness of her own bad behaviour.

  Philip, she feels, has failed her. Philip does not take her out to lunch, admire her, hold her hand, tell her she is beautiful, take her to his hotel room and cover her with love bites, reduce her to all orgasm and then politely take her to tea at the Ritz, where she can satiate eccentric desires with cucumber sandwiches and lemon tea; then put her in a taxi and send her home in time to take the dog for a walk and have a bath before supper. This young man does, and has been doing so twice-weekly for months. They are dream afternoons. She can hardly remember the young man’s name. His face is oddly like Philip’s, but his body is singular, leaner, harder, wirier, and shocking through its unfamiliarity. She will wake up in the night and recall its feel so vividly he might almost be there beside her, with Philip lying sleeping, quiet, remote, and polite three feet away. Philip is a peaceful sleeper. You would hardly know he was there. She wonders if he has dream visions of her conduct. There is something mysterious about Philip asleep.

  Jocelyn’s mind, brain and intentions seem to have nothing to do with her twice-weekly afternoon behaviour. It is only her body which does the desiring, walks her towards her lover, makes her stand quiet and compliant beside him in the lift, allows her to receive him without argument or doubt. It is nothing to do with her. Her body, moreover, is quit
e without taste or judgement. Jocelyn suspects that any man would do.

  Jocelyn is really shocked.

  She is, moreover, three months pregnant. It is, amazingly, her husband’s baby. She has not told her lover. She knows he will think it gentlemanly to conclude the affair. She does not want the affair concluded. She does not want Philip to find out about it. Supposing he doubted the parenthood of his own child?

  ‘Marriage is a serious matter,’ she says to Scarlet now. ‘And what about Byzantia? She needs a father. If he’s keeping you now he is a good, kind man. And that, after all, is what we all want. There is something very rich and rewarding in just seeing a marriage through its bad patches. He hasn’t done anything bad, has he? He hasn’t been unfaithful, he hasn’t hit you, he supports you. And Byzantia too, don’t forget that. What possible reason have you for leaving him? It’s irresponsible.’

  Jocelyn listens to herself talking and is aghast. She hears her mother in every word.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and goes to her pink and orange bathroom and is violently sick.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks Scarlet. ‘You never used to be quite as bad as this.’

  ‘I just don’t know,’ says Jocelyn. ‘Except I’m pregnant, and bloody trapped, and miserable as hell.’

  ‘That’s better,’ says Scarlet.

  Jocelyn regrets her indiscretion, and is thereafter cold and formal with Scarlet. She parts with her lover. Every morning she is sick. Every afternoon she is lonely, and sees her life as something finished, over. She has withered and perished like a leaf on the tree. Oh, Miss Bonny! That was the fate Jocelyn mapped out for you and grieved for you over, as you sang lustily in morning assembly. Yet she never dreamt of it for herself.

  The very fertility of Jocelyn’s body now seems something macabre and unwholesome. How can someone so dead as she produce anything that is alive and good?

  Jocelyn miscarries, sure enough. She resumes her former life, but without her lover, who has found a new married lady to take to tea at the Ritz. She sees them both one day, walking down Piccadilly. The woman looks like her; it is as if she sees herself approaching, another young woman who dresses, walks, talks like Jocelyn. The man looks like Philip, dresses, walks, talks like Philip. Jocelyn has forgotten the saving graces; the importunate nature of his body; the flurry of orgasm; the communion, not just with another body, but with the whole common pulsing universe of experience. Now she feels only the humiliation, the waste, the passing of good things.