A Whistling Woman (19 page)

“Nobody likes cooking if people sit and grin and reject what they've cooked.”

Leo ate a few mouthfuls. “Are sheeps worse than shrimps, are shrimps worse than accidental grubs in plums or slugs in lettuces?”

“I don't know. It's interesting that we all ask.”

“I bet you couldn't kill a sheep for yourself.”

“I certainly couldn't.”

“Or even a hen.”

“Or even a hen.”

“We don't have to kill hens. They give us eggs.”

“Give is the wrong word. They don't have much choice.”

“But if we
take
their eggs they aren't dead. I could live on eggs.”

“You'd be bored.”

“You could think of lots and lots of eggy things. Are there eggs in rice pudding?”

“No. Rice and milk. And sugar.”

“How pure,” said Leo.

He was a master of spoken English. He took a long time to read eggs, milk, mutton. He stared, and flushed, and sweated.
The second
Through the Looking-Glass
was called “Free Women.” Frederica took this title from the sections of
The Golden Notebook
about Molly and Anna, the women living alone, or with children, without men. Her guests were Julia Corbett, a novelist, and Penny Komuves, who worked on a new women's magazine called
Artemis.
Penny lived with Frederica's old friend Tony Watson, the Labour Party journalist and commentator. Tony wrote sometimes in
Artemis,
which aspired to be about everything that interested women, not only feminine things like love, and make-up, and fashion and fat. Tony wrote articles for them about comprehensive schooling, and the advantages and disadvantages of single-sex education. He wrote a piece on the First Woman Prime Minister, an imaginary figure who would rise to power in about 2020, red-brick educated, a northerner, an industrial tribunal lawyer, a mother. “I cannot see in my crystal ball, what her husband is like,” Tony wrote. “Maybe he is a quiet schoolteacher. Maybe he is a successful surgeon. Maybe he too is a politician, a journalist, a union leader. They will believe that what both of them do is of equal importance. Neither will walk two steps behind, like a royal consort.”

Penny Komuves was the daughter of a Hungarian political thinker who had fled in 1939. She had read politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, and specialised professionally in articles about the new anxieties of female graduates, who found themselves alone in kitchens with infant children, admonished by experts like Bowlby that any prolonged separation between mother and child might damage the latter's development irrevocably. Their heads were full of Lawrentian ideology, or particle physics, or the sociology of leisure, or the labour theory of value, and their hands were full of suds, and souffles, and strained purees and stained nappies. Is this all, they asked, and as yet found no answer. Penny Komuves's other interest was cookery. She researched, in her spare time, receipts for borscht and salmagundy, cock-a-leekie and cassoulet, pigs' trotters and confit of cockscombs. She was a culinary scholar and a culinary scientist. She wrote, in
Artemis,
every week, a suggested menu for a five-course dinner. Everything, the bread, the petits fours, the soups, salads and terrines, were hand-chosen in markets and delicatessens, home-brewed, home-baked, home-made.

Julia Corbett, a generation older than Frederica and Penny, was somewhere between a lady novelist and a woman novelist. Her subject was the lives of women. Her titles were the titles of her generation. Witty variations on confinement.
The Bright Prison. The Toy Box. I Cannot Get Out, Said the Bird. The Cold Frame. Life in a Shoe.
These trapped titles connected to a series of semi-savage ironic uses of nursery rhymes.
The Pumpkin-Eater. Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. Lucy's Pocket.
Phyllis Pratt, Bowers & Eden's successful blackly funny thriller writer had added darker versions.
Her Indoors. Come into My Parlour.
Julia Corbett was the author of
The Toy Box
and
Life in a Shoe
. Her latest novel was called
Just a Little Bit Higher
.

Swing me just a little bit higher
Obadiah do!
Swing me high and I'll never fall
Swing me over the garden wall
Just a little bit higher
Obadiah do!

It told the story of a happy marriage, where the teacher-husband encouraged his gently devoted wife to take a degree by correspondence, to train as a teacher herself. He then left her, qualified, pregnant, and “free,” for a younger, prettier, frailer student. Like all Julia Corbett's books,
Just a Little Bit Higher
was tartly bittersweet. Its edge of aimlessness frightened Frederica more than the ferocity and violence of
The Golden Notebook
.

The set for “Free Women” turned the inner glass box into a transparent doll's house, with windows and doors of many kinds scrawled on it with a childish simplicity. There was a multiplicity of keys and keyholes. Inside, the three women sat round a kitchen table with a pink and white, imitation damask, plastic cloth. On the table were earthenware bowls heaped with eggs, or full of rising dough under teacloths. There was a tray of jam tarts, pastry flowers with scarlet eyes, ready to go into the oven. There were egg cups in the shape of hens, wearing knitted cosies like bobble-caps. There was a heaped collection of precise silver instruments (mostly tarnished) for performing arcane operations—marrow-scoops, button-hooks, sugar-tongs, toast-racks, tea-strainers, forked cheese-knives, along with impregnated dusters and pots of jewellers' rouge. There were whisks, and wooden paddles, jam cauldrons and thermometers. Can-openers, corkscrews, whelk-prods, and other instruments for poking and prying. The whole gallimaufray suggested, as the camera zoomed, a gynaecological theatre as much as a
batterie de cuisine
.

The cartoon creatures who sauntered and bobbed across the screen during the discussion were mainly from kitchen scenes in
Alice
. The leg-of-mutton, crowned with his paper frill, dripping with basting-fat, bowing and grinning. An animated capering cruet, salt, pepper, mustard, on spindly legs. A serenely floating flounder on a transparent serving-dish. The master-stroke, visually, was the mixing of these creatures with a bevy of Victorian childish cherubs' winged smiling curly bodiless heads, who occasionally melted into diminishing Cheshire Cats, and buzzed across the corners of the screen kitchen like swarms of flies.

With the two savants Frederica had been Alice, the clever and questing girl. With the two women, Wilkie said, he wanted her to create a kind of elbows-on-the-table
ka fee-klatsch,
the kind of talk women did when not overlooked. And how could they do that, Frederica asked, when they were overlooked intimately by a male camera-crew and studio staff, and even more intimately by the unseen millions? It will be surprisingly easy, Wilkie assured her. I picked you because you aren't frightened.

In fact what ensued was a knowing parody, a send-up of a
ka fee-klatsch
.
Frederica began with the question Sigmund Freud put to himself, and said he could not answer. What do women want?

Love, said Julia Corbett. Love, certainty, a family.

Sex and naughtiness too, said Penny Komuves.

Only sex is a long thing said Frederica. Because it leads to childbirth and all that is one long biological process. Except that now—with the Pill—women can pick and choose amongst men, and pick and choose whether to breed, or not.

They discussed whether this would change the way women saw men. Julia said women judged men on things that weren't apparently sexual, like kindness, like listening, like keeping appointments on time. Like courtesy. Frederica said Darwin had said that male beauty was determined by female sexual selection. So it was odd to live in a world of women's magazines, women's advertisements, with women's bodies decorated for men to look at. Penny said she thought it was mostly women who noticed other women's clothes. Frederica said, there is Miss World, and the perfect pneumatic body in swim-suit and stilettos. There is pornography. Penny Komuves said that since the peacock and the mandrill had tail-feather and buttock designed to attract females, it was odd that we did not have male beauty parades.

What would women look for? Julia asked, with mock timidity. Men wrap themselves up in customary suits of solemn black, and cut their hair and shave away their beards.

Not any longer they don't, said Penny. They grow it flowing, they wear flowery shirts, they dangle jewellery round their necks. The balance is shifting.

They discussed the aspects of the male body on which a hypothetical female jury would mark. Y-front advertisements were briefly mentioned. Male buttocks were timorously, and then gleefully, debated. Frederica described an art student whose close-fitting jeans had strategic holes revealing soft, brilliant purple knickers. The three women laughed. Modern women were free to choose, they agreed. To pick and choose. Like their primitive ancestors. Unlike their grandmothers, or even, in most cases, their mothers.

And where did it get them? Julia Corbett asked. The problem was still there. Women wanted children, women had to care for children, and in a way this only made all the sexual possibilities
stressful
.

The Pill, said Penny Komuves, meant that men could insist on sex because an impediment, a danger, had gone.

The body, said Frederica, wants to be pregnant. The woman often doesn't. I think of the Queen in
Snow-White,
seeing the drops of blood on the snow. We fear their appearance, we often fear their absence, worse. We are at war with ourselves, perhaps. After the choice provided by the Pill, there could be the choice of abortion. To decide to separate sex and children, to move both into the area of choice. Could either of you choose abortion?

No, said Julia. I might think I ought to be able to. But I couldn't choose it. Or so I think, now.

Penny Komuves looked briefly frozen, shook her head, and turned the question back to Frederica. Well, would you, she asked. Would you?

Frederica saw Leo's face in her mind's-eye. I might, she said. I might like to feel I had the right. I might not.

There was a shiver of silence. An angel passing, said Julia Corbett.

The cartoon cherubs fluttered. The pig-baby peered out of its swaddling-bands.
The screen showed a series of portraits of George Eliot, the chosen person of the programme. There was the heavy-awkward horse-face, the difficult teeth, the younger woman awkwardly bowing her gross head under the inappropriate ringlets. Tenniel's ugly Duchess flashed across the screen. Frederica remarked tartly that she had known a man who had felt that an exam question could be set on this great writer, quoting a description of her as a “gaunt, moralistic Dame.” Discuss. Nevertheless, for most of their own discussion, and perhaps because they were on the screen, they circled round the subject of female beauty. Eliot punished her beautiful characters, Julia said. No, said Frederica, she punished those who
exploited
it, who
lived by it
. Hetty, cold Rosamund, chilly, terrified, power-crazed Gwendolen. Her warm-blooded heroines were beautiful too. Dorothea, Maggie. But they wanted something else out of life besides sex and marriage, and sex and marriage defeated them. She punished them, said Julia. She punished Dorothea for high-mindedness and Maggie for throbbing with emotion. She made Dorothea decline into marriage with a second-rate journalist, and punished Maggie for sex, with drowning. She couldn't make a model of a woman who could be free, and creative, and sexy. She couldn't give her readers any hope.

“She was free and creative and sexy,” said Frederica. “She must have been the most public adulteress in England, and in the end Queen Victoria commissioned a series of paintings from her books and they tried to bury her in the Abbey.”

“She had no children,” said Penny. “She knew about contraception, sponges and vinegar.”

“She looked after G. H. Lewes's sons,” said Frederica. “She earned their school-fees.”

“Like a man,” said Julia. “She earned money. Like a man.”

“She couldn't let Dorothea found a university, or Maggie write a book,” said Frederica. “She was telling it how it was. How clever women's lives
were
.”

“The pretty women,” said Julia, “are made to want
things
. China and damask, a bottom drawer full of sheets and tablecloths, a casket full of pretty ear-rings, like Hetty's. It's like the advertising world now. Everything still heads towards a rite of passage in a froth of white veiling with an attentive crowd trying to see the face underneath, and imagine what the body under the white lace, or satin, or organza will be doing when it's naked. And you have a great table of
things
—like we've got here—people have lovingly given you. And afterwards, you see the
things
were like the cheese in the mousetrap, and there you are in the kitchen, surrounded by them. Staring out of the window—women in novels are always staring out of windows, thinking how to get out, how to be free.”

“And
things,
” said Frederica, “brings me to this week's object, which is: A Tupperware Bowl. Actually, we have three examples for you, because we couldn't choose which colour.”

The screen showed three pudding-basins, side by side, one in a pearly rose-pink, one in a duck-egg aquamarine, one in a soft lemon yellow. They were photographed against a white background. They were softly translucent, yet thick-skinned. Their lines were clean, pure, machined, repeating. Their shadows were beautiful, dove-grey, and identical. They had the elegance of an abstract painting.

Julia said they were lovely. She said they were clean-lined, they were light, they were useful. They were liberating. Look—she gestured—at all that mess on the table, all that fussy silver-cleaning, all that enslavement to objects. I remember hideous bakelite things in the war. These go with machines that do give us time, if we can use it. I put on my washing-machine—which has clean pure lines like this—and it washes, and I write. I agree, it would be useless if I wanted to be a forensic lawyer.