Down Among the Women (21 page)

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.

‘Oh, yes,’ says Audrey-Emma vaguely, ‘the children. Paul doesn’t like the children. He has no time for them. If only they were chickens he’d feel differently.’

‘Where are they today?’ asks Jocelyn.

‘He’s looking after them. They’ll be nervous wrecks by the time I get back. He’s an anal obsessive, I think. He makes them scrub their nails and examines between their toes. Well of course there’s mud there. There’s mud everywhere.’

Jocelyn wonders if Audrey-Emma is not having some kind of nervous breakdown.

‘If I stay,’ pleads Audrey-Emma, ‘I will go mad.’ There are tears in her eyes. ‘But I can’t leave,’ she goes on, ‘because if I do he will follow me and kill me. I know he will. He believes in marriage. It looks,’ says Audrey-Emma, ‘as if I have to choose between madness or death.’

‘I’m sorry,’ murmurs Jocelyn, inadequately. This is not the kind of conversation she is accustomed to having in the Kardomah.

‘If only some man would come along and rescue me. But who would look at me? That’s another thing Paul has done—he has aged me prematurely. He nags me, long into the night.’

‘About what?’

‘Everything. Anything. He believes I personally carry fowl pest with me, I think. I slave away in that house, and all he ever says is how he could do it better. If that’s the way he feels, why doesn’t he? But oh no, that’s woman’s work, he won’t demean himself. If he’d let me take over the business side of the batteries we’d be rich in no time, but will he? No. He’s terrified I might do it better than him. What am I going to do? Why does he always find fault with me?’

‘Perhaps you find fault with him,’ Jocelyn ventures, but Audrey-Emma doesn’t hear.

Audrey-Emma’s face has lost its girlish roundness. She looks peaky, as well as dowdy, and there are lines of resentment deepening round her eyes. Jocelyn smoothes hers away nightly with beauty creams. Audrey-Emma smears honey on her face from time to time.

‘You have let yourself go a little,’ murmurs Jocelyn.

‘I have, haven’t I,’ says Audrey-Emma, not without satisfaction. ‘Why should I be pretty just for him? He wants me to be a dowdy housewife, so that’s what he’s going to get.’

‘I think you should make the best of it,’ says Jocelyn. ‘You have three children, after all. Once you have children you can’t just think of yourself, you have to think of them too.’

‘What kind of future will it be for them?’ Audrey-Emma laments, ‘with a father like Paul.’ She consults the menu. ‘Do you think I could have a cream pastry? Paul says cream’s all right so long as it isn’t sweetened.’

She eats her pastry. Presently a worldly man with greying hair and a journalistic air comes in for coffee. Audrey-Emma, hampered only slightly by the bulk of her tweed skirt, darts over to join him, deserting Jocelyn instantly. It is her old editor. The lines on her face smooth out as if by magic; she grows prettier and more animated minute by minute. She clasps the Editor’s hand. How white her skin is; how female and nonsensical her whole being. He laughs at her but is entranced. She practically lays herself down, there and then, legs apart, offering herself as a sacrificial victim. How can he fail to deliver the ritual blow?

They leave together.

Audrey-Emma whispers a farewell to Jocelyn. ‘You don’t mind, do you, darling? He’s such an old fool, but he might do a thing on chicken farming. I’m not deserting you, am I? It’s for poor Paul’s sake: I have to chat him up a little.’

And they’re gone, the Editor holding Audrey-Emma’s little elbow closely, as if afraid she might wander off by accident.

Jocelyn, pale, elegant Jocelyn, so longing for love, so afflicted by discrimination, is left to pay the bill.

Scarlet has discovered the C.N.D. She works in its headquarters. Byzantia addresses envelopes in her childish hand. Edwin is furious.

‘Long-haired lefties!’ he mutters. ‘Do what you want, if you insist on being associated with cranks and perverts, but leave Edwina out of it.’

‘Do you want the world to be blown up?’ enquires Scarlet. They are touring through Boreham Wood. Byzantia dozes on the back seat. (‘She stays up too late watching television,’ as Edwin has already observed. ‘She’s not getting enough discipline.’)

‘You over-simplify issues,’ he complains. ‘You are absurdly naïve, even for a woman. We must defend ourselves, or the reds will simply walk in.’

‘You’re mad,’ observes Scarlet.

He drives rather fast and badly, when they are quarrelling, which they do frequently. It is a miracle they are all still alive. It is their ninety-eighth weekly outing.

‘It’s very depressing,’ he says. ‘What a flighty mind you have. All those Common Cause meetings and they taught you nothing.’

‘I suppose you think better dead than red,’ she sneers.

‘Indeed I do,’ he says. ‘Without freedom life is not worth living. If this country went red I would kill Edwina with my own hands.’

‘Do you hear that, Byzantia?’ asks Scarlet of her daughter, who fortunately is too busy counting pubs to hear. Scarlet has weighed up the emotional disadvantages of their car rides with Edwin, and the financial advantages, and decided to continue them. What she cannot do, not even to save her daughter, is to behave decently during their jaunts. Is it so difficult to appear to agree, to appear to accept criticism? she asks herself, and the answer comes back, yes, difficult to the point of impossibility. She usually returns home with her nails bitten to the quick, one or two outbursts of grief and rage the worse. (‘You are a hysterical woman,’ he complains. ‘I can argue rationally, why can’t you? It is a fact that I am older than you. If you would just agree that my experience of the world is greater than yours, we could be perfectly happy.’ His back pains are much better, these days, now there is no likelihood of him finding himself back in bed with Scarlet.)

‘I wish you would stop calling her by that ridiculous name,’ he says now.

‘It’s her real name,’ says Scarlet.

‘I have been consulting my solicitor about it,’ he says. ‘An individual’s real name is the one he is called by. All the same I would like her to have her Christian name changed by Deed Poll.’

Scarlet does not reply at first. He has a certain tone of voice which he uses when he makes final ultimatums; he does not add, ‘Or I will stop the money.’ He does not have to.

‘Isn’t that rather expensive?’ she asks, finally, with what she feels is cunning. ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea just to let one person call her one thing and another another?’

‘Not if one of those names is Byzantia.’

‘What’s so awful about Byzantia anyway? I’ve never known.’ Scarlet sounds quite cheeky. There is going to be real trouble.

‘It’s foreign,’ he says. ‘Not that I have anything against foreigners, but why call an English child by a foreign name? Her father wasn’t foreign, was he? Black, or anything?’

‘Does it look as if her father was black?’

‘That kind of thing can skip a generation.’

‘Please,’ requests Scarlet, ‘do we have to have this conversation in front of Byzantia?’

‘In front of whom?’

‘Byzantia.’

‘Oh, Edwina, you mean. Edwina is too young to understand what we are talking about.’

‘Your fantasy child Edwina may be. My Byzantia is not.’

‘I support, feed, clothe, care for and love that child. I suggest that makes her as much mine as yours.’

‘Oh no,’ says Scarlet. ‘Oh no.’

‘What is more,’ he says, ‘I think the time for this nonsense is over. If you are mentally disturbed that is a pity, but it has been going on for too long. It is time you returned home. People are beginning to talk.’

‘What? After two years? How impetuous people are in Lee Green!’

He stares at her, wondering if she is being sarcastic, and nearly crashes the car into a bollard.

‘Would you mind driving more carefully?’ She is polite.

‘I am a very good driver. I am taking my Advanced Motorists’ Test presently. Please do not change the subject.’

‘You changed it yourself by trying to kill us. You are so full of hostility and anger it has to come out somehow. You are the most violent person I know.’

‘And I certainly have no intention of paying another bill for this trick-cyclist of yours if that’s the kind of nonsense he feeds you.’ (Scarlet has been seeing an analyst weekly. She charges 50/- a session.) ‘I am a very mild and civilized person. Anyone else would have beaten you to death by now. I demand a straight answer, Scarlet. You can’t play silly-buggers with me. When are you coming home?’

Scarlet does not reply.

‘I have supported you and Edwina for two years, out of the kindness of my heart. Anyone else would have divorced you. I think it is time I received my reward.’

‘You want me back in your bed, do you?’ Scarlet is smiling. It is a bad sign. Byzantia begins counting lamp-posts, feverishly.

‘I want you back in my home, where you belong.’

‘But not in your bed?’

‘You know my state of health,’ he says. He is pale, ‘I love you and need you, Scarlet. I miss you. My most earnest desire is to have you and little Edwina back. I think I am more conscious of the higher states of love than you, Scarlet.’

‘But not back in your bed? Not that I was ever in it, more than once.’

‘I am an ill man.’