Down Among the Women Read online

‘And there were good times, there must have been. I remember the feel of carpet between my toes. It’s been this bloody lino ever since. It gets harder and harder to clean.’

  ‘If you don’t like living here,’ says Wanda complacently, ‘you can always leave.’

  Scarlet—lumbering, helpless, trapped Scarlet—glares. Presently she says, ‘You never used to wash the paint. I remember dried-up trickles running down the bedroom wall, where you’d thrown coffee at him. I dream about them sometimes. If I could paint it would be my motif, only I can’t paint, I can’t do anything.’

  ‘I wasn’t born to wash paint,’ says Wanda. ‘Nor was I born to bring men breakfast in bed either. Kim was perfectly healthy. Perhaps times have changed, I don’t know. Did your young man expect you to bring him breakfast in bed? Wash his socks, iron his shirts? Come along now, Scarlet, give us your experience of men.’

  She is being as disagreeable as she knows how, believing as she does that Scarlet has never had a steady boyfriend but merely sordid sexual encounters.

  ‘Don’t start,’ says Scarlet, nervously.

  ‘What me, start?’ enquires Wanda in a voice shriller than usual. She is starting, all right. ‘Why should I start? I’m thrilled to bits about the baby. Such a surprise it’s going to be. We don’t know what we’re going to get. Colour, shape or size, might be anything—except losing its I.Q. points daily, that we do know. Reminds me of the story of Royalty visiting the maternity hospital. Royalty inclines towards young mother. “What lovely red hair baby has, mother. Does he take after his father?” Answer: “Don’t know, ma’am, he never took his hat off.” ’

  ‘Do you think I wanted to get pregnant?’ says Scarlet gritting her teeth.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ shrieks Wanda, ‘or you wouldn’t have.’

  Scarlet snivels. Wanda subsides for the time being, contents herself with muttering, ‘Those stupid friends of yours—’ She can’t abide them. Helen, Jocelyn, Audrey and Sylvia. They seem to her lightweight creatures who have rendered her Scarlet even more obtuse than was inevitable. Scarlet hasn’t the energy to defend them, but manages a little spirit on her own behalf.

  ‘It isn’t my fault,’ she mutters.

  ‘And whose is it, mine?’ enquires Wanda.

  ‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, feeling pleased with herself and quite perking up.

  ‘Christ,’ says Wanda.

  ‘You didn’t give me a proper home,’ says Scarlet, smugly.

  ‘And what are you going to give that?’ asks Wanda, pointing.

  ‘Everything,’ says Scarlet, with unexpected vehemence. ‘I’m going to give it all the love it needs. I’m going to give it everything I never had.’

  ‘I gave you what I could,’ says Wanda, seeming quite impressed by this outburst. ‘You can only give what’s in you.’

  ‘Other girls in my position would have had an abortion,’ says Scarlet. ‘At least I see things through.’

  ‘You’ve got another twenty years to go,’ says Wanda. ‘I had three abortions in my time, which, come to think of it, isn’t finished yet.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about them.’ Scarlet feels quite sick now. Is it the baby? Or her mother? Who’s to say?

  ‘Well you shall. I feel quite bad about them, if that makes you feel better. I used to think perhaps you were my punishment. If I’d tried one of the others instead of you it might have turned out better.’

  ‘You are a revolting woman,’ says Scarlet, and means it, and is tempted to tell her mother that she knows perfectly well who her baby’s father is, and that he is everything that would most appal her. She makes do with, ‘Father’s new wife is younger than me.’

  Wanda says nothing at first. Then, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I asked him.’

  ‘You mean you’ve seen your father?’ Wanda is shaken.

  ‘I spoke to him on the telephone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘You’re wasting your time. He doesn’t want anything to do with you.’

  ‘I know,’ says Scarlet, not without bitterness.

  ‘Did you want to tell him about being pregnant? Break the good news? Was that it?’

  ‘I was going to, but I couldn’t. He talked about himself, he didn’t seem to want to know about me. It was very formal and rather embarrassing. His new wife is called Susan. She is twenty. Do you think my baby is going to be a monster, mother?’

  Wanda is surprised not only at being called mother, but by the panic in her daughter’s voice: Scarlet seems to have stuck in her kneeling position. Wanda helps unfold her. Scarlet has tears in her eyes.

  ‘I only wanted,’ gasps Scarlet, ‘I only wanted …’

  ‘What?’ asks Wanda, ‘what did you want?’

  ‘I only wanted to give you something to make up for all the other things,’ says Scarlet, in desperation.

  ‘Give me something?’ repeats Wanda, incredulous. ‘Like a baby?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispers Scarlet.

  ‘You were born to make me a laughing stock,’ says Wanda.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ asks Scarlet, panicking now at last. ‘How am I going to live? What’s going to become of me? Mother?’

  The ribbon gives up its tightening process, postpones more strenuous activity for another little while. Byzantia, curled and cosy, drifts back into sleep.

  ‘You’d better ask your father,’ says Wanda briskly and astoundingly. ‘Go on, ask your father. Why not? I’m finished. I have nothing to tell you, nothing to advise you. Go on. Get out of here. Ask your father.’

  3 A CERTAIN SUNDAY

  DOWN HERE AMONG THE women. Is there no one nice, ordinary, and pleasant? Yes. There’s Jocelyn, Helen, Audrey, Sylvia, Wanda, Scarlet and kind, kind Byzantia. Millie, Lettice, Lottie. It depends only on which of their words one chooses to listen to, which of their actions to overlook. And Susan, Scarlet’s father’s new wife, is nicest of all, slender of waist, and thick of mind, thick as the trunk of a kauri tree in the New Zealand forests whence she comes, and of which she is so fond, almost as fond as she is of Kim, Scarlet’s mother Wanda’s first husband and Scarlet’s daughter Byzantia’s grandfather.

  Down here among the women we like to describe people by their relationship with others. It makes us feel more secure, or as if someone might notice when we die. So Sylvia says.

  It is a momentous Sunday afternoon for everyone. What configuration of the stars is this?

  Sylvia has gone to the pictures to see La Ronde. She sits in the ninepennies, near the front, for she is short-sighted, and a little deaf in one ear. Jocelyn stayed at home to wash her hair. It is dripping wet when Philip arrives, slim, tender-mouthed, grey-suited, in search of his true-love Sylvia, and failing to find her tells his troubles to Jocelyn. He fears, really fears, that abstinence will ruin his health. What is Sylvia playing at? She slept with him once, then never again. Why? Jocelyn wraps a towel turban-wise around her hair and explains that Sylvia’s mental balance is delicate besides her eyes and her ears being weak, and he must not worry her; and all the time her own flesh draws nearer and nearer to this unsuitable young man, who, being Sylvia’s boyfriend, can only be illicit. She cannot help it; it is nothing to do with her; her soul cries out, but all it can say that she can hear is bully one, bully two, bully three and away, and it makes no sense. Now they are flank to flank, and her voice is telling him about Sylvia’s schoolgirl abortion, while the world grows darker and darker with desire. And here they are in bed, while he consoles his disenchantment. How did they get there? The pillow is wet from her hair; now it will take hours to comb and curl. She takes this as evidence of overwhelming passion. She feels so bad about wronging Sylvia that she fails to notice how languid are the young man’s habits—or that though flesh still calls to flesh, it is now from an irritated frustration rather than any aspiration to fulfilment. They are to marry, in the future. And serve her right, you might well say.

  Sylvia returns from La Ronde, and finding her Philip st
ill in bed with her Jocelyn simply blanks out conveniently and does not mind. It seems an extension of the film. Sylvia loses such small sense of the reality of her existence as she has so far managed to retain.

  She closes the bedroom door, makes tea, takes it in to them and sits on the end of the bed and chats, telling them the plot, singing the theme tune, liberated from suffering. Philip decides that Sylvia is mad, and he has done the right thing. He is quite wrong. With Sylvia’s tender mental balance and his tender mouth they would have been well matched.

  Bully off, gels! Hockey one, hockey two, hockey three and away! Jocelyn played centre-forward at school. They wore their dark green bloomers and had hockey practice in a public park. Men in raincoats would gather to watch, but the staff did not seem to notice. Once Jocelyn’s elastic had broken by accident. Once Jocelyn had broken the ankle of the opposing centre-forward, by accident. Jocelyn’s life is dogged by accidents. Bully one, bully two, bully three and away! Faster, cries Miss Bonny, all long socks and tunic, faster! Out to the wing, gels! What, no one there? No one waiting? There is tragedy in her voice. No one waits for Miss Bonny, or only Jocelyn after school, and though Miss Bonny makes do, it is not what she wants. What all women want, Miss Bonny explains, is love. In the meantime, hockey one, hockey two, hockey three and away! Bully off, gels. How lovely life is before one catches a glimpse of death.

  Helen is this afternoon busy encompassing her own, although it will be fifteen years before it matures and lays her on the floor in Wembley Park with little Alice there beside her.

  Right now Helen sits naked, white, and rather blousy on a camp stool in X’s studio. He stands and paints her. On the other side of the studio stands Y his wife, also at an easel, also painting Helen. X is good-looking, tall, brilliant-eyed and craggy. Y is rather plain, though they say a better painter than X. It was Y’s idea that Helen should be there, should model; now Y is not so sure it was a good idea. X’s real name is Alexis. Y’s real name is Yvonne. Their friends—and they have many—know them as X and Y, never imagining a time when they might not be together.

  ‘Do you have to wriggle?’ asks Y crossly.

  Wriggle? Helen turns her head to stare with her brilliant witch eyes at Y, whom she has thought until this minute she adored. She is angry. She turns back to face X, and catches his eye. Her pupils dilate: from now on she returns, whenever Y is not looking, the frank admiration with which she knows full well he looks at her. Naked or clothed about his house, she now moves languidly. She kisses his children, raises her eyebrows gently when Y fails to cope with them. Y should have kept her mouth shut. Death gets to her quicker than it does to Helen; having a straighter, smoother path to run. Y keeps looking over her shoulder to see how he’s getting on, which one should never do. It takes only ten years from those five careless words for death to catch up with Y.

  And Audrey? Audrey is being taken over the V. and A. by Paul Dick, a potter. He thinks he will change her name to Emma. It suits her better. She agrees, thinking he will have forgotten about it tomorrow. She would not dream of arguing with him. He knows so much, and she has so much to learn. Even sex, at which she thought herself well trained, now appears a mystery. He reads her pornographic books, observes and photographs. She has little opportunity to roll on French letters. After he has finished talking, indeed, she is usually too tired to care. Still, she is learning about art, pottery, wine and jazz. And what is she on this earth for? Why, first to fuck, and then to learn, according to Paul Dick. Such language is new to Audrey, and impresses her. Back where she came from f— was a swear word, not a description of an activity.

  Scarlet’s father Kim Belcher lives on the fourth floor of a redbrick Edwardian block of flats off Baker Street. Scarlet walks up and down outside for some few minutes. She is a conspicuous figure, for she does not own any maternity clothes. She wears an old skirt of Helen’s, dating from the days when Helen was fat, and a Fair Isle jersey which Lettice knitted for Wanda decades ago, which Wanda did not like and would not wear. It is both unbecoming and indestructible, a terrible confection. Scarlet’s coat is her own, and held together beneath her bosom by an ill-concealed safety-pin; it divides at this point over the swell of her stomach like a pair of theatrical curtains framing a stage. Her shoes are down at heel and her lisle stockings fraying where they have been darned. (Nylon stockings are for the rich and those with American connections. Only dancers wear tights. Ordinary respectable people have stockings which go into holes, not ladders, and are darned. The thread for so doing comes on cards of graded colours.) So Scarlet demonstrates her misfortune to the world.

  She will go to her father, and she will say unto him, ‘Father, behold thy child.’

  She has already said it on the telephone, mind you, and though he has been polite, he has not been encouraging.

  Yet if she, his child, asks for bread, will she be given a stone?

  Quite possibly. Kim, like Wanda, does not read the Bible. Kim has a strong sense of survival. Besides, Kim has replaced his daughter with a child wife.

  Scarlet is nervous and feels like crying. Her legs will not take her up the steps. She gets cramp in a calf and has to stand on tiptoe and raise and lower herself two or three times before the pain goes. She is afraid of overbalancing. She is in a nightmare. Pretty soon, she thinks, if things go on like this, she will be obliged to wake up. What age is she, having this dream of a projected, impossible future? Six? Seven?

  But her mother has said, ‘Ask your father.’ It is not just permission, it is a command.

  She decides to telephone. She searches her pockets for three pennies. There are handkerchiefs (no tissues, they do not exist) a medical card or two, her blood grouping (O) and a half-crown and a couple of farthings which would be worth fifteen shillings if only she had them today.

  Scarlet is obliged to go into two cafés and have two cups of tea and two buns before she can accumulate three coppers. It is not in Scarlet’s nature to ask for change. Wanda has trained her too well to expect anything but nothing from nix. Scarlet herself will do a favour for anyone: and she can ask the enormous ones of others (look at her now, demanding recognition) but the little ones are beyond her. She cannot ask strangers the time or for change for the telephone. The buns—bright yellow from dried egg—give her heartburn.

  Kim does not answer the telephone. He is out. Susan Watson answers it, in her refined little voice, with its careful vowels. Her mother voice-trained her on the voyage back from New Zealand—where they had spent the war—so as not to disconcert Mr Watson, Susan’s father and now Kim’s boss, with the closed nostril taint of New Zealand speech.

  Scarlet is taken aback. She had assumed Susan to be a stage prop, not a real person. She has never answered the telephone to Scarlet before. Scarlet has accepted Susan in Kim’s bed—a marionette to be wound up at bedtime and perform—but not as someone with power, opinions, or even feelings.

  Susan too is taken aback. But she is welcoming, even eager. Kim is out. But why doesn’t Scarlet come round? Scarlet says she’ll be there in two minutes.

  Susan has a pretty round doll’s face, set in a sweet expression, and an obliging disposition.

  Susan thinks it’s marvellous to be married to Kim: she loves playing houses; she even loves Kim.

  Susan despises Kim’s former wives for having failed to make him happy.

  Susan is envious that Kim has a past and she has not. Sometimes she worries lest she too, should become part of Kim’s past.

  Susan likes being so much younger than Kim. It is the same kind of showing off as she has always done, from puffed sleeves as a little girl when no one else had them, to passing round the telegram at school which said her brother had been killed in action.

  Susan wants now to show off in front of Scarlet. She has so much; and poor Scarlet—daughter of Witch Wanda—has so little. She got to University, true, but when was a clever woman ever happy? So Susan’s mother said when Susan failed her school certificate. Clever women don’t make good wive
s, and in good wifedom lies happiness. So spoke Susan’s mother, lying on a beach in New Zealand, while her husband did fire-duty thirteen and a half thousand miles away.

  Susan runs round the flat like a busy little girl, tidying, plumping cushions, putting on bright orange lipstick.

  Susan puts on the grill for toast—it’s Sunday and tea-time, after all—and prepares to patronize Scarlet.

  Susan is eight and three-quarter months pregnant. She has been married nine months. Kim had to marry her, not because they had f— (Susan has barely heard the word, ever) and she was pregnant but because she wouldn’t before they were married. Susan’s mother said not to. Now Susan’s mother knits little woollies and nudges her husband to make Kim a full partner in the firm; he has already done so but she never listens. Or if she does, she soon forgets.

  Down among the women, if you are very very careful, and shut your eyes and ears, and keep your knees together nearly always, you can live really quite happily. Susan’s mother does. It was Susan’s brother, not Susan’s mother’s son, who was killed in action. That at any rate is how Susan’s mother always refers to him. Poor Susan’s brother. Not even Susan’s poor brother.

  Susan shows no outward signs of deserving pity. Even now, as she opens the door to Scarlet, her face barely changes—she smiles sweetly on.

  Scarlet faints.

  Byzantia, noticing a change in her environment, prepares to abandon it. (Nothing will make Simeon—Kim’s son, Byzantia’s uncle, poor Susan’s dead brother’s nephew—leave Susan except the due processes of time, pressure and the conjugation of the stars. A ritualist now, and always will be, whatever the inconvenience to others.)

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Susan. It is her strongest expression. No wonder Kim, having lived through Wanda, is so devoted to her. He has not yet had time to grow bored. Presently he will get into the habit of saying he’s going to die of boredom, and presently indeed he will. But that’s a long way off.

  Susan spent seven years in New Zealand, where girls are expected to be practical, so she drags Scarlet inside, and heaves her on to the couch. She has never seen anyone so untidy. Even Scarlet’s stomach, Susan notices, is lopsided. Perhaps Scarlet is going to have a lopsided baby? Scarlet wears a wedding ring. It leaves a green stain. Woolworth’s, thinks Susan, who is knowledgeable, as well as practical, as well as nice, and often shops at Woolworth’s where you get good value for money. She has a streak of parsimony.