Down Among the Women Read online

  Jocelyn was at college with Scarlet. She took her degree in French. Now she is looking for a job.

  Scarlet got sent down for failing all her exams, twice over. Now Scarlet is in trouble.

  Sylvia, who did classics, and shares a flat with Jocelyn, has been in trouble already. She had an abortion when she was fifteen but can’t really remember it. (Jocelyn, who was at school with Sylvia, and now more or less looks after her, seems to know more about it than Sylvia herself.) Sylvia is training to be a Personnel Officer at Marks and Spencer: she has a nice quiet boyfriend called Philip, and is, these days, a nice quiet girl. Sylvia is sorry to see Scarlet in this condition, but is frightened lest Scarlet suddenly bursts and spatters them all with blood and baby, which seems likely. Scarlet wears only a semi-transparent nightie; she is too far gone to consider decencies. Scarlet’s nipples are brown and enlarged. Sylvia stares. Scarlet droops.

  Even Helen, beautiful Helen, with her green witch eyes, her blood-red nails, her high white bosom, makes little impression on Scarlet today. Helen has been married and divorced already, in Australia. What a mysterious and magic creature this orphaned Helen seems, moving as she does in a grown-up world, where the others feel they still have no right to be.

  Helen allows Audrey to share her flat, and pay the rent. Helen paints pictures, starves to buy paint, loves and is loved by men who have their names in the papers.

  Audrey, who types in a solicitor’s office, which is where her degree in English Literature has led her, not only pays the rent, but washes and irons Helen’s clothes, and thinks herself privileged to do so.

  These kind pretty girls, with their tightly belted waists and polished shoes, seem to Scarlet to come from an alien world. She can’t think why they bother with her. There is, though Scarlet can’t think why for the moment, something very wrong about their presence here.

  Scarlet’s stomach hardens and goes rigid. Scarlet frowns. The feeling is not so much unpleasant, as an unwelcome reminder that her body now thinks it owns her.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ asks Sylvia, anxiously.

  ‘Just getting into practice,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘Aren’t you frightened?’ whispers Sylvia.

  ‘Don’t put thoughts into her head,’ says Jocelyn briskly. ‘Scarlet is young and healthy. Think of native women. They just have their babies in a ditch, and then get up and go on harvesting or killing deer or whatever they’re doing.’

  ‘And then they go home and die,’ says Audrey. ‘I had two aunts died in childbirth within a week. Mind you they both had the flu, I’m not saying it’s going to happen to Scarlet. And London hospitals are better, they say, than Liverpool. Though awful things do happen.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ says Scarlet, and it’s true, she isn’t.

  Helen gives a little disbelieving laugh but says nothing. Sometimes she reminds Scarlet of Wanda.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Scarlet, hoping they will all go away, so she can ease herself out of her transfixed position, ‘it’s very kind of you, and I may take your offer up.’

  She doesn’t believe in any of it. She doesn’t believe that Wanda is her mother; she doesn’t believe she is pregnant; she doesn’t believe she has no job and no money; she doesn’t, if it comes to it, believe she’s a day older than five. She has been sleep-walking for years and years. She has summoned up these four friends from some dim fantasy.

  ‘I know what’s wrong,’ she says suddenly, looking round the startled girls, ‘where are all the bloody men?’

  She shuts her eyes and opens them again. They’re still there. She can’t understand it.

  Down among the girls.

  2 ASK YOUR FATHER

  CONTRACEPTIVES. IT IS THE days before the pill. Babies are part of sex. Rumours abound. Diaphragms give you cancer. The Catholics have agents in the condom factories—they prick one in every fifty rubbers with a pin with the Pope’s head on it. You don’t get pregnant if you do it standing up. Or you can take your temperature every morning, and when it rises that’s ovulation and danger day. Other days are all right. Marie Stopes says soak a piece of sponge in vinegar and shove it up.

  The moon, still untouched by human hand, rises, swells, diminishes, sets. Nights are warm; the wind blows: men are strange, powerful creatures, back from the wars: the future goes on for ever. Candles glitter in Chianti bottles; there are travel posters on the walls; the first whiffs of garlic are smelt in the land. To submit; how wonderful. If you don’t anyway, little girl, someone else will. Rum and Merrydown cider makes sure you do, or so they say. Quite often it just makes you sick.

  There is a birth control clinic down in the slums. You have to pretend to be married. They ask you how often you have intercourse—be prepared. They say it’s for their statistics, but it’s probably just to catch you out. They have men doctors there too. A friend knows one—he’s a tiny little man who shows her dirty pictures and likes someone else to watch. Are they all like that? And how do you know, if you go to the clinic, that you won’t get him?

  Every month comes waiting time: searching for symptoms. How knowledgeable we are. Bleeding can be, often is, delayed by the anxiety itself. We know that. It’s the fullness of the breasts, the spending of pennies in the night, the being sick in the mornings you have to watch out for. Though experience proves that these too can be hysterical symptoms. And what about parthenogenesis? Did you know a girl can get pregnant just by herself? Consider the Virgin Mary.

  Try hot baths and gin. There’s an abortionist down the Fulham Road does it for £50. But where is £50 going to come from? Who does one know with £50? No one. Could one go on the streets? And why not? Jocelyn once said, when drunk, it was her secret ambition. No, not to be a courtesan. Just a street-corner whore.

  Down among the girls.

  Helen has a diaphragm, and a gynaecologist. He fitted her privately, majestically, wearing a rubber finger stall; very nice. She keeps it in a very pretty white frilly bag. Where does she get the money? Audrey, who earns six pounds a week, degree and all, doesn’t like to ask. In any case, Helen very often forgets the symbol of her common sense, and doesn’t take it with her.

  Audrey likes men to wear condoms. Helen says it’s because she wishes to be protected not just from disease and babies, but from the man himself; Audrey, says Helen, prefers there to be no real contact. When Helen says things like this they all feel puzzled; 1950 London is not a motivation-conscious place. Audrey says no, she just likes rolling rubbers on, the same way she likes squeezing spots, plucking hens, and gutting fish.

  Sylvia says and possibly even believes, she doesn’t go to bed with men, but every month there she used to be, worrying as much as anyone. Married men would take her out a lot; hard-drinking ones. Perhaps she simply didn’t remember? At the moment, anyway, she is settling down with Philip. They hold hands: they love each other: they are happy. He is not married. It all seems lovely. She is not worried now, except for the possibility of parthenogenesis.

  Jocelyn, surprisingly, takes no precautions at all. She doesn’t believe she is a woman. In her mind, she still races round the hockey field, scoring goals, while the school cheers. Every month she doubts her own disbelief, is clenched and pale with anxiety, until her female flow once more underlines her female condition, and the cycle starts another round.

  Now they stare at Scarlet, swollen and monstrous. There but for the grace of their hormones, the chancy consideration of men, go they. Yet they envy her. Something has actually happened to Scarlet. She has left the girls, and joined the women, and they know it.

  ‘Why is it,’ asks Audrey, for no apparent reason, ‘when men expose themselves at you, it’s all mottled and purple?’

  It seems the wrong subject for the occasion. No one else wishes to discuss it. Only Scarlet rouses herself.

  ‘Because it’s cold,’ she says.

  The girls go. Scarlet gets up and dresses. During that afternoon, Wanda feels obliged to explain the incident of the Brahms lullaby.


  ‘I’m teaching it to them at school,’ she says. (Wanda is a primary school teacher—on supply. She roams from school to school and thus avoids the moral problem of having, under the Education Act, to teach religious knowledge.) ‘All the little girls cradle their arms and lap it up and even the nasty little boys grow misty-eyed. If only mother love were like that.’

  ‘If only,’ says Scarlet sourly. She is conscious of a twinge which starts in the centre of her back and runs round to meet in the middle and then is pulled very gently tight, like a ribbon. She doesn’t mention it to her mother. What, give her the pleasure? It is probably nothing, in any case. The ribbon is taken away. There, nothing.

  ‘The snows of yesteryear,’ says Wanda. ‘How they do hang about, rotting us all. I have always wished for a torrent of truth to pour down and sweep the myths away; I thought this last war would have done it, but no. “Lie warm in thy nest, by moonbeams caressed,” ’ she sneers. ‘Some man wrote that, and you needn’t think he ever changed a nappy. And I am still required to teach it, plus other guff about my country right or wrong, and needlework for the girls, in this year of Our Lord 1950, or rather P.B.5, which means Post Belsen Five, if you want to know.’

  ‘I think babies are rather sweet,’ says Scarlet bravely, and watches for Wanda’s nostrils to flare, as she has since she was a tiny child. Tormenting Wanda was never without its pleasures.

  ‘So do you,’ Scarlet adds, ‘because you cried.’

  ‘It was the pickled onions,’ says Wanda, cool as can be. ‘I was watering them down for the lady divorcées, who are sour enough as it is. Lettice used to sing Brahms’ Lullaby, I do admit.’

  Lettice was Wanda’s mother, Scarlet’s grandmother.

  ‘What, to you?’ enquires Scarlet, surprised. Lettice, who died under anaesthetic in 1925, while (according to Wanda) having a facelift, has hardly been presented as a maternal figure.

  ‘No, of course not to me,’ says Wanda harshly. ‘If she wanted to keep me quiet she’d feed me opium. She would sing it to Harry; she would sit and tinkle at the grand piano on Sunday when he visited and hope he would be touched and leave his paramour and come home. It just irritated the piss out of him. He couldn’t wait to get back and lay his hoary old bird.’ Harry was Wanda’s father, Scarlet’s grandfather.

  ‘All the same,’ says Wanda, with a certain melancholy, ‘it is a pretty tune, and she had a pretty voice, much good it did to her. When she moved into her bed-sitting room in Barons Court she took the grand piano with her. If one visited one had to sit under it, so one did not visit much. Not that that was the real reason. God, she was a useless woman.’ Wanda is bitter.

  ‘She must have given you something,’ says Scarlet, who has always had a sneaking admiration for her unseen, long-past grandmother. Divorced, abandoned, disregarded, ageing, penniless—to forge her daughter’s signature on an insurance policy, spend it on a facelift and die—or is Wanda just making it up? There is a photograph of Lettice taken in 1898; a young woman all hat, smiles and frills. Wanda can’t bear to look at it. Scarlet has it on her wall, just to annoy.

  ‘She gave me opium,’ complains Wanda. ‘There was a teething medicine on the market then, guaranteed to soothe any infant. She gave it to me by the bottleful. She gave me dreams I couldn’t hope to keep up with in later life. She gave me lessons in how not to be, the useless bitch. But I won’t hark back,’ she says with a cold and dismal ferocity, and repeats, ‘I won’t hark back.’

  ‘Something to be said for you as a mother,’ says Scarlet. ‘You’ve given me nothing to want to hark back to.’

  ‘I have tried to be honest,’ says Wanda, and adds, kindly for one so attacked, ‘Do you feel all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Scarlet. She looks round the room, with its sparse furnishings, and it dissatisfies her. She thinks the green and yellow lino looks dirty.

  ‘Going to start scrubbing?’ enquires Wanda.

  ‘No,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘But you want to, don’t you? It’s the nesting instinct. Down on your hands and knees. It means you’re about to produce any minute now.’

  ‘No, I am not. Actually, I think it’s a phantom pregnancy,’ says Scarlet hopefully. ‘If it wasn’t I’d have had it by now.’

  Wanda snorts; puts water in a pail, produces a bar of green soap and a scrubbing brush and induces her daughter to scrub.

  ‘When I was married to your father,’ she says, ‘we had a daily help to do the scrubbing.’

  ‘How nice,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘It was revolting,’ says Wanda. ‘And so was she.’

  ‘I wish I could remember her,’ says Scarlet. ‘I can’t remember anything nice.’

  ‘There was nothing nice about Mrs Richmond, the thieving old bag. She got killed in an air-raid, in the house of someone she was doing for. They’d gone away and she was having a bath. And why shouldn’t she? Poor withered filthy old soul: at least she died happy, in green, hot, scented water. She didn’t believe in doctors or medicine. She’d wave her deformed hands at me—she’d dislocated both thumbs at one time or another—and glare out of her rheumy eyes—she had a cataract in one of them, too—and thank God in her croaky voice for her perfect health. Silly old bitch.’

  ‘You shouldn’t speak so badly of the dead.’ Scarlet swirls happily in soapy water. She loves to hear Wanda talk about the past. It makes her feel real.

  ‘At least I remember her,’ says Wanda. ‘She used to water the whisky, too. Think of it, whisky in the 1930s, when the whole country was starving.’

  ‘Perhaps you had a right to it,’ says Scarlet. ‘Perhaps you deserved a little treat. I mean people do, sometimes.’

  ‘How like your father you are.’ This is just about the worst thing Wanda can say to Scarlet, but Scarlet is in a kind of scrubbing trance. ‘Your father had no guts, either. He could have been a good painter but he sold out. He painted what people wanted.’

  ‘He had to live,’ remarks Scarlet.

  ‘Why?’ enquires Wanda. ‘He was no good to anyone. He woke up one morning and went all over his canvases painting the clothes out and all the genitalia back in.’

  ‘Perhaps he thought it was better like that.’

  ‘No, he thought it would sell and so it did. I thought it was piss-awful and told him so and he hit me. He got me on the side of the head, and shook my brains up good and proper; my ears sang me tunes for days. I fell on the floor. He poured water over me to revive me. He revived me all right. I got the side of his face with my nails, freshly cut with good thin edges. He hit me on the chest: he knew that would frighten me. Well, you know what happens to blows on the chest.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You get cancer,’ says Wanda.

  ‘That’s an old wives’ tale,’ says Scarlet.

  ‘Of course it is,’ says Wanda, ‘but it doesn’t half make you nervous. Other women’s boobs were for selling to the bourgeoisie for wall decoration, mine were for turning rotten. That was what your father was like.’

  ‘They were good paintings.’

  ‘They were not. After he hit me I broke into his exhibition in the middle of the night and slashed them all, every one with the kitchen knife, which was what they deserved.’

  Scarlet does not comment. She has heard the story often. It seems to worry Wanda—and certainly did her husband Kim at the time. The police prosecuted and he did nothing to stop them.

  ‘Actually,’ says Wanda, ‘I was doing him a good turn because the publicity made him even richer. They said in Court I did it because I was jealous of his mistress, but I promise you that day in Court was the first time I ever knew she existed.’

  ‘Was that when you cried?’ asks Scarlet.

  ‘Certainly not,’ says Wanda, lying. ‘Why should anything like that make me cry? He’d sold out his principles, that’s why I did it.’

  ‘He did good paintings,’ says Scarlet obstinately. The ribbon tightens round her middle again, and presently loosens.

  ‘He did not.’
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br />   ‘He did so.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ asks Wanda.

  ‘I’ve seen some.’

  ‘Where?’ Wanda is sharp.

  ‘In the bloody Tate, so there,’ says Scarlet.

  There is silence from Wanda.

  ‘I don’t tell you everything, you see,’ says Scarlet presently, smugly.

  ‘Where were they? Down in the basement?’ demands Wanda, clutching at straws.

  ‘Yes,’ admits Scarlet.

  ‘I thought so,’ says Wanda, relieved. ‘They keep all their old rubbishy paintings down there, which they’ve bought in those fits of insanity and malice to which they appear to be prone. They ought to burn them and destroy the evidence, but they haven’t got the guts in case later generations jeer.’

  She points at her daughter’s stomach.

  ‘I can imagine that thing jeering, can’t you?’ she says.

  ‘The thing about all those women he painted,’ says Scarlet, ‘is that they all look like you.’

  ‘There is more to a woman,’ says Wanda, ‘than her tits, her arse and her cunt, although your father was never really convinced. It’s what turned him against Russia, in the end. All those women in boiler suits.’

  Scarlet does not reply. She feels very cross.

  ‘Tits, arse and cunt,’ repeats Wanda, to annoy further. ‘Why did you want to go and look at his paintings, anyway?’

  ‘He is my father,’ says Scarlet, plaintively.

  ‘Now you’re getting maudlin,’ says Wanda.