Down Among the Women Read online

  She runs home, crying. ‘We are all alike,’ she says to Philip, who comes home early, for once, and is concerned because her gloss seems to be cracking. ‘We are all just the same people. I can’t bear it. I want to die.’

  ‘Poor Jocelyn,’ he says. ‘You need a baby. You need something to occupy yourself with,’ and he makes a real effort to provide her with another. She has trouble conceiving. She takes her temperature first thing every morning, and on the nights following the two mornings in the month on which her temperature rises, he attempts to impregnate her. Jocelyn doesn’t really want a baby, though she says she does. She thinks it might look like Philip, or like her lover, or both. Poor lost Jocelyn.

  She takes the dog for a walk one day, and throws a stick out into the Round Pond, which is frozen over. The dog, unusually for him, sees fit to chase out after it. He skitters and skates over the ice, which cracks. The dog falls through and is drowned.

  Philip buys her a tropical aquarium and asks her to make sure she doesn’t electrocute both the fish and everyone else in the house. She sulks for days after this remark, and refuses him that night, even though it is Ovulation Day. She has never refused him before; never really, of course, having had much opportunity.

  (‘Frigid I may be,’ she said to him once, lightly, lying still, stoical and unmoved, ‘but I’m not mean. I can’t stand mean women who use sex as a weapon.’)

  Philip, angry at this uncalled for rejection, goes to visit that same original stripper, whom he has called on occasionally through the years. She doesn’t laugh at him now. On the contrary, she seems to admire him, and look forward to his visits. He drives her out to a lay-by outside London in his large shiny car and there in the sinful dark of the back seat he conquers her; and punishes her for that female depravity which he both loves and despises. They could stay peacefully and more comfortably together in her bed, but the very thought of such domesticity causes Philip to become as nervous, limp, and ineffectual as he is with his wife.

  Sometimes Philip enquires of Jocelyn after Sylvia; she remains in his mind as a vague, pale, drifting figure. Jocelyn by comparison is strong and vivid, as clearly defined and precise as her table arrangements. He does not regret marrying her—she is all he could want as a wife—but he wonders sometimes what life would have been like had he not called on Sylvia that day and found Jocelyn washing her hair instead.

  Philip is having trouble with his vision. Sometimes, as he stares at letters, research papers, memos, marketing documents, folios of this and folders of that, his eyes blur and he can make no sense of what he sees. At other times, sitting in meetings, elbows on the highly polished board table, flanked by shrewd, talkative men in expensive grey suits, his ears simply seem to stop hearing.

  Otherwise, he has no trouble with his work. He does what he has to efficiently and quickly. He makes decisions with no trouble. He does what he can, and does not get ulcers. He is liked and trusted. Sometimes he wonders if it is because he lacks imagination that he survives so well in office life. For he has no fear of what might happen next. He simply deals, with an eye to both past and future, with the exigencies of the present.

  Belcher and Watson now have two adjacent ex-town houses in Mayfair. Their receptionists are beautiful. Their accounts include instant coffee, dandruff shampoo, a new soft toilet tissue, and a detergent washing powder. Times are good. There seems no end to progress.

  Y’s paintings have become fashionable. Fans from all over the world come tapping at the studio door, and if X answers it, they do not know who he is. X finds it bitter.

  X has trouble selling his paintings. He is thirty-three. New young men have arisen, to wield brushes and sprays with a flashy expertise which outdates his, caking paint on paint with meretricious abandon and taking away, with the shallow energy of youth, the acclaim which is rightly his.

  ‘You mustn’t worry,’ says Y. ‘It is fashion. Acceptance should make no difference to what you do. In fact it’s a very bad sign to be popular, look at me.’ And she laughs nervously.

  But she knows, and he knows, that she is working better than ever before, and that he is getting nowhere, nowhere, except older. And that when he shouts at the children they ignore him. And that flesh is gathering around his waist; and that when he and she are in bed together, her success, his failure (for so far as he is concerned, the one implies the other) folds itself like some monstrous filmy french letter between them, and interferes with the very act of love.

  Y is unwilling to sell her paintings. ‘Look what happened last time I had any money,’ she says. ‘You couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Helen was a witch-woman,’ X says, ‘it had nothing to do with you. She laid a spell on me. She thought she could lure me to some kind of doom; but you saved me.’

  Y smiles and feels safe.

  Helen encounters X at a Private View. Her connoisseur lover, Carl, escorts her. He likes to show her off, and indeed she is magnificent. On this particular evening she wears a white brocade dress and a solid African necklace. Her eyes glitter. She is strong, bold and vivid; though there may be perhaps something slightly bovine about her these days, a heaviness, a resignation, an idleness.

  Carl is a small, wiry man—he darts round her, here and there, tugging her this way and that, adjusting her hair, straightening a seam, ever careful of his possessions, like a tug servicing a steamer. Helen regards him with a kind of disdainful surprise.

  X and Y make their entrance. They are accustomed to making entrances; though the pattern has changed. Now it is Y who walks first, and he like a handsome shadow behind. Y looks better now than she ever has or ever will. She wears a limp green dress which clings to her limp body and makes the limpness seem blessed. Her movements are as weary as ever, but now as if the ecstasies of vision have tired her, and not just the housework. Her fine silky pale hair curls up at the ends, and she has mascaraed her pale lashes. She is gracious.

  Carl darts, tug, terrier, gnat, all at once, to Y’s side. He buys her paintings, not X’s.

  Helen follows, shaking off her admirers like a wet animal, getting rid of rain. She approaches X and Y.

  ‘See,’ she seems to be saying to them, ‘I am handsome and happy. I don’t need you. I never really did.’

  All the same she does not quite meet X’s eye, as if she feared what she might see in them, or worse, fail to see.

  ‘Why, Helen,’ says Y, kindly. She is holding X’s hand, and feels proud and powerful. She speaks to everyone around. ‘Helen used to be our model.’

  ‘I’m afraid I wriggled,’ says Helen. Her voice is pitched lower than ever. It has a husky note, now, which she has taken pains to develop. It involves the listener, willy-nilly, with the night she spent before—was it full of sex or tears, or both? What dreadful, fearful marvellous things might that voice not speak of next?

  X goes off to fetch drinks.

  Helen is left alone with Y.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Helen, eyes downcast. ‘I have been so wretched, thinking how I betrayed you.’

  ‘It wasn’t a betrayal,’ says Y. ‘It was all just rather silly. Don’t build things up into dramas.’

  ‘Will you forgive me?’ asks Helen.

  ‘Of course,’ says Y, and even smiles.

  ‘I’m happy now with Carl. But I miss your friendship. It was so important to me and I threw it away.’

  ‘Forget it,’ says Y. ‘It’s all over now.’

  ‘Well anyway,’ says Helen, ‘you’re doing so well now. Perhaps you could use the experience in your work? I wish I was creative. I just have horrid experiences, you see, and that’s that. I can’t turn them into anything. I can’t transmit them.’

  Y looks a little blank, but still benign. She strokes Helen’s hair, lightly, as if blessing her with a touch, and Helen seems to bloom, and the heaviness falls away as if some miracle had taken place.

  Y asks Helen round to a meal. She feels invulnerable. She offers blessings. She bestows kindnesses. She indulges X. She paints.
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br />   That evening she feels a little less sure of herself.

  ‘How did you think Helen was looking?’ she asks X.

  ‘Like one of Carl’s ladies,’ replies X.

  ‘And what are they like?’

  ‘He has a crude taste,’ says X, and she is satisfied.

  When X finds out that Y has asked Helen round to a meal he is perplexed. He rings Helen to explain why he thinks she should not come. They meet for lunch. They talk about Y, which sanctifies the feeling they both have, which is that if they cannot sleep together they will surely wither up and die.

  They talk about Y all the way back to Carl’s flat in the taxi, not touching, not looking; they admire Y’s works, her looks, her talent, her sensitivities; they agree how she must be protected from too violent memories of the past. By the time they reach home they are in a full-scale conspiracy against Y.

  Carl is out, as both have known.

  ‘And what about you?’ X asks Helen. ‘What about you?’ Y’s pictures hang where once his used to.

  ‘I hate it here,’ says Helen. ‘I feel like a meringue full of whipped cream. I am not alive. I have not been alive since I was close to you and Y. I need you both.’

  She spreads her hands, stares at them. They are broad, powerful, freckled hands. Y’s are thin, tapering, delicate. They are done unto, they do not do. Helen’s hands move, take command, control. X loves them. He always has. It is her hands which now he places round his waist.

  She wears a white open-necked shirt and full pink skirt. The carpet is red, her skin opalescent. He pauses to admire the colours and the textures, but only briefly.

  At four o’clock she says, ‘At five Carl comes home.’

  At ten minutes to five X leaves, with a last look round Y’s overseeing paintings—

  ‘She’s the best painter,’ he says, ‘the best woman painter the world has known for a long time.’

  ‘It was as if she was here with us,’ says Helen, ‘and forgave us.’

  At dinner that night she sits quiet and smiling.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ says Carl, who is mid-European and careful to use colloquial English expressions, which he utters in precise and cultured tones.

  ‘How good a painter is Y?’ she asks.

  ‘She will fetch a pretty penny now,’ he says. ‘She will fetch an even prettier penny in a year or two.’

  ‘That is not what I meant,’ says Helen.

  Carl does not bother to reply. He leans under the table as far as he can go, and pinches her sharply between her legs.

  ‘That made you squeal,’ he says, and laughs merrily. Helen picks up her glass of wine and sips. The glass is real Venetian and the wine real Beaujolais.

  She goes, on the appointed day, to supper with X and Y. They eat haricot beans and bacon, and elderberry wine. (The children are with Y’s sister, who is married to a farmer, and lives in Wales.) It is like old times.

  When the children are away, Y thrives. Her cheeks grow pink: she laughs. She does not care about anything, anything. If her husband and Helen were to make love on the floor in front of her, she would watch with interest, and not with terror and despair.

  For it is the children, when they sleep upstairs in their bunk beds, in a litter of dust and toys and old sweet papers, who make her turn to X with such angry and possessive desperation. ‘Look,’ she says in her heart, ‘you have altered me for ever; you have given me children and I can never be myself again, I must be part of them. Look how they cry, and whine, and sap my strength; I have to feed them, fill them up. I have to fight them for my being. And you, look at you. You stay the same. You implant your seed in me and walk away and leave me to it.’ And she binds him to her with chains of guilt and penance, and won’t let pleasure in.

  But when the children are away, when she is free, can sleep and wake when she wants, can sit, and sit, at breakfast-time, and tea-time, and supper-time, how young and gracious she can be. ‘Run off,’ she almost says. ‘Run away, do what you want. Come back to me with a smiling face, that’s all I need.’

  She lets X take Helen home. What largesse! And when they are gone she washes up the dishes and sings, so great is her confidence and her cheerfulness; and X and Helen have a quick and furtive engagement in the alley that runs beside Carl’s house; she standing, he awkward but imperative; and then Helen goes in to Carl, and he goes back to Y; and she takes more pleasure in Carl than she ever has before, as X does with his wife.

  11 CRUCIFIXIONS

  ROSE COMES TO ME with stories. Rose lives in a tower-block where sub-culture myths abound—they spread across the country like the german measles, in and out of Council estates, up and down the tower blocks.

  I shall repeat two of them. They are nasty stories, but they are not true. Myths are not true. Myths simply answer a need.

  But what kind of need can it be, down here among the women?

  MYTH NO. 1

  A detective told us, so it must be true. It’s not in the papers, it’s too horrible. It happened in Clapham High Street. A young woman took her five-year-old boy shopping. He wanted to go to the toilet. She took him to the Ladies but the woman there said he was too big, so he had to go to the Gents by himself. His mother sent him down and waited on top of the steps for him to come out. She waited and waited. A gang of young boys went down and when they came up she thought they were acting a bit strange. But still no child. Finally, she asked a passer-by to go down and fetch him. There was her child, dead. They’d cut off his willy and he’d bled to death.

  MYTH NO. 2

  A young mother has three children, a daughter of four, a boy of two, and a new baby. The little boy wets his pants. The mother is in the habit of saying, ‘If you do that again, you naughty boy, I’ll cut your willy off!’ One day she’s bathing the baby when there’s a shriek and then silence. The little girl calls out, ‘It’s all right, Mummy. He was a naughty boy again, but I cut it off.’ She drops the baby and rushes to see. The boy dies; when she gets back the baby has drowned.

  What about that poor little girl then? Down here among the women. Would you like your little boy to sit next to her at school?

  My children come up to me. They are cold, and sit on either side of me. I wrap the edges of my cloak around them and we all three sit and stare out into the world.

  So we all protect our children, or try to, but they too must come to it, and be part of the past like us. Where is little Alice now, Helen’s child? She used to play with my children. Mine are still here, mine can still feel hungry, cold and frightened; mine still play. Alice is a pile of little bones. I would like to feel her spirit has entered some other body, and was not wasted, so terribly, but can one believe such things?

  Well. Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is, for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to that terrible horizon. It seems as if, bewildered, he has to pause to scoop them up as well. Give yourself over entirely to fiction, and you could have eternal life. That’s what Jesus said—though look how that story ended.

  Certainly not down here among the women. Who ever heard of a crucified woman? Who would bother?

  ‘Socks,’ says Emma-Audrey to Jocelyn. ‘Socks. Two male children, and one man. Six socks a day seven days a week. Forty-two socks a week. Why? Why do they wear them, and worse, why do I feel obliged to wash them? Millions starve all over the world, other millions go barefoot—I wash socks. Jocelyn, I am so bored.’

  They eat lunch in a Kardomah Cafe. Cottage-cheese salad, and good coffee. Emma-Audrey is discontented. She looks at her hand-knitted sweater with contempt. She raises her wash-sodden hands to her hair—home-washed in rain-water which Paul tests with a Geiger counter for radio-activity—and longs for the feel of lacquer and artifice, carcinogenic though such frivolities tend to be.

  ‘Can’t you take more interest in the hens?’ suggests Jocelyn.

  ‘Hens are boring birds at the best of
times,’ says Emma-Audrey, ‘and battery-reared hens are worst of all. They have no character. They have no one to talk to. They are reared in isolation.’

  ‘It is strange the way Paul has gone over to the other side,’ says Jocelyn, who never liked Paul, which is presumably why Emma-Audrey has now sought her out. ‘He used to be all for healthy living. Quite the nut-cutlet man.’

  ‘He’s an Egg Marketing Man now,’ says Emma-Audrey. ‘He puts penicillin in the mash, and hormones, and do you know what, every year he looks more and more like a hen.’

  Jocelyn is shocked. Jocelyn never speaks of her husband in disparaging terms. Even to her lover, Jocelyn spoke well of Philip.

  ‘I would love to live in the country,’ she says vaguely.

  ‘Why?’ asks Emma-Audrey, sourly.

  ‘To be in touch with the seasons.’

  ‘All one is in touch with is mud. You can’t think how much there is. On the floors, and the walls, and all over clothes, and in one’s hair. Mud. Smelly mud, too. You can’t think how filthy battery farms are. On mucking out days I take the children to friends. I can’t go to my mother’s, of course, because Paul won’t let me.’

  Jocelyn does not pursue this.

  ‘It must be profitable,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, it is,’ says Audrey-Emma, plucking at her knobbly skirt. ‘But he’s so mean. Look at the rags I have to wear.’

  ‘I thought you liked weaving,’ says Jocelyn.

  ‘No,’ says Audrey-Emma, firmly. ‘He told me I liked weaving, and I believed him, more fool me. Now look at me. Stuck away in the country, with only hen farmers to talk to, mud up to my ears. I can’t go on like this.’

  ‘You have the children to consider,’ says Jocelyn, who still has none.